Creation 5

The word Jesus uses for ‘perfect’, in the alarming teaching ‘Be perfect as God is perfect’, is τέλειος, and it means complete, finished, something that has done what is was supposed to do or become what it is supposed to be. If I go home today and pick apples and make the perfect apple crumble, that is a teleios apple crumble and the apples are teleioi. They have become completely what they are supposed to be, at least from my point of view. Which makes it interesting that from the apples’ point of view they aren’t perfect, they aren’t even apples any more in any way that an apple might recognise, because I’ve eaten them.
So Jesus is not saying to the crowds Be nice or Be nicer or Go further or Do more or even Be different. He is saying Be everything. Be everything you are supposed to be. Find everything you are, do it all, get there, finish the race. Be perfect.
And to illustrate this - as a model - he points them towards God. God is perfect. That doesn’t mean God is exceptionally good at everything or always keeps his room tidy. It means God is completely God, is everything God can be. I am that I am, says God, introducing himself to Moses. God is perfectly God, God is completely God: God is.
That’s one thing we know about God. God is. The other thing we know is the whole story that says that for God, being God means loving us. And not just us here but also the apples in my crumble and the planet Jupiter and the centipedes in my compost heap and all the people I particularly dislike. That’s what the first reading is about. Something perfect might be something complete in itself, something that didn’t need anything else. But God is perfectly God, and it’s not that sort of perfect. God pours himself out in love; being God means doing that. This is not the perfect calm of a lake: this is a torrent, a waterfall, Niagara.
Jesus is talking to the crowd about other people. How they could be towards other people. He is saying Be towards other people the way God is to other people. Don’t be nice to the nice ones and disapproving to the nasty ones. Love them. Not because that will do them a lot of good, but because you need to be perfect. You need to be everything that you are, the way God is everything God is, and you cannot do that by closing up inside yourself and being perfectly cut off; or by judging other people and being perfectly right; you have to do it by loving people. You may end up unrecognisable to yourself or your friends, the way the apples ended up unrecognisable as apples. But you will have become the person God is pouring himself out to make.