It’s 2015 and the year is full of possibilities. My commitment for the year is a commitment to authenticity. I’m currently involved in an email conversation with an acquaintance. She writes, “My church is not a safe place to ask questions?” I’m committed to asking my questions and living into the answers that emerge – even if it feels threatening to me or to anyone who reads this blog.
I’ve been pondering two big questions for a while now. They grow out of my own genuine curiosity. That curiosity has been fueled by my work in the Faithwalking community as well as by my aging process. The first question is, “What does it mean to be fully human?“
In Matthew 5:43, Jesus says, “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.” When I was growing up, this verse was used to teach me that God wanted me to live a morally perfect life. You can imagine how discouraging that was. Try as I may, perfection was out of reach. So, I learned to hide and pretend. The hiding and pretending rob me of the opportunity to learn and grown. Perhaps more than any other influence, this passage and all the forces of shame, guilt, and striving that it produced led me to believe that the Bible taught that a fully human life was a morally pure life.
Today I see that differently. The Greek word that Jesus uses in this passage is the word telios. This word evokes another definition of perfect – “lacking no essential detail – as in, I’m perfectly content. Look up telios in any standard Bible dictionary and here’s what you will find – (1) lacking nothing necessary to completeness, (2) full grown, adult, of full age (mature), and (3) consummate human integrity.
When Jesus says be perfect he is saying be a whole and complete human being. Be fully human!
That begs the question, “What does a whole and complete human being look like?” In the context of the passage Jesus is teaching his disciples to love their enemies. In fact, enemy love is the hallmark of Jesus’ teaching. He says that all the law and the prophets are summarized in loving God and loving neighbor as self. (Matthew 22:34-40) Taken in the total context of the New Testament, I say it like this – Jesus teaches me how and calls me to love God, neighbor, self, stranger, and enemy.
As I integrate all of that with my own life experience, I’ve come to believe that to be fully human is to be fully loving – not just when it is easy but in the most difficult, challenging circumstances and relationships. It is to be a loving presence in every relationship, in every context that I find myself. Not that I need to, but I want to confess that I fall short of this standard on a regular basis, but it is a standard to which I am committed to learn over a lifetime.
In my own life experience, there are two big, pervasive ideas that compete with the view that to be fully human is to be capable of being fully loving in each and every circumstance and relationship.
One competing idea is the idea that the fully human life is found in being religious. You get the fully human life through regular participation in events, activities, rituals and traditions that are considered sacred. These sacred ideas stand in contrast to other events that are considered secular.
A second competing idea is the idea that the fully human life is found in being a consumer. One finds the fully human life by getting more and more of the goods and services offered by a market driven society.
Today there is a deadly combination of these two big ideas – religious consumerism. Religious institutions compete with one another to provide sacred events, activities, rituals and traditions. In my estimation, one by-product of the massive presence of religious consumerism has resulted in massive numbers of people who claim to be followers of Jesus but who do not have the capacity to love others well.
The Apostle Paul says it well when he writes to the Galatian Christians.
He writes: It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on. (Galatians 5:19-21)
The fully human life is the life of courageous, radical, selfless love. I’m pressing in to the questions that the pursuit of this kind of life raises.
Photo Credit: Bible Study