“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Read alone, the last verse of Matthew 5 sounds like a demand to be flawless, and it is easy to close the book there. The verse asks for something you can begin today. At the end of that chapter, “be perfect” asks for a love that is whole, the Father’s kind, which reaches people who give nothing back, and when Luke closes the same argument he uses the word merciful.
A paragraph about enemies
The verse is the last line of a paragraph about enemies. Jesus has just said, in Matthew 5:44, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” He gives the reason in the Father himself, who “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” Then he asks what is special about loving people who love you back: “do not even the publicans the same?”
Then comes verse 48, and its “therefore” ties it to everything before. The Father is the pattern, and the way he is described is the way he treats people who give him nothing.
Luke ends it with merciful
Luke has the same teaching, set on a plain where Matthew sets his on a mountain, and it runs the same course: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, what thank have ye for loving those who love you. Then it closes.
Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.
Luke 6:36 (KJV)
Set the two closing lines next to each other. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father.” “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father.” The argument and the closing frame match, and in Luke the word that fills it is merciful. Leviticus 19:2 already had the shape, “Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy,” in the same chapter that says “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Jesus takes that command and stretches it all the way to the enemy.
A word for grown up
Matthew’s word is teleios, which means complete or full-grown. Hebrews 5:13-14 uses it for the opposite of a baby: “every one that useth milk… is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age…” James 1:4 puts perfect beside “entire, wanting nothing.”
The only other time in Matthew that Jesus says how to be perfect, he is answering a question about what is missing. In Matthew 19:20-21 a rich young man asks, “what lack I yet?” and Jesus says, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor…” The missing piece would have cost him everything he owned.
Meek has the same trouble at the start of this sermon: an English word that arrives sounding like a judgment on your character and turns out to describe a direction you can walk in.
A chapter later
Matthew 5:48 also closes a run that started at 5:20, “except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees,” and the Father it points to has no flaw. The King James and the World English Bible both print perfect, and they are right to.
Yet the same sermon, a chapter later in Matthew 6:12, teaches its hearers to pray, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” The standard is a whole heart toward God and neighbor, asked of people who will still need forgiving. They will need verse 12 again and again, and the love asked of them leaves nobody outside it, which is a demand of full size.
Perfect here means love with nobody left outside it, and the place to begin is the one person your love keeps stopping short of. Jesus gives the first step in the same paragraph, “pray for them.”
Perfect begins with one name, said to God tonight.