Mt 5:48 says, “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect”. There is a sense in which this is a literal imperative which seemingly, definitionally, is impossible to achieve. Its import leaves the reader wondering if Jesus was mocking our imperfections, and incapacity for perfection, from a higher perch. For a very long time, more so when I sit down to write, I have battled the feeling, that I have no basis being in the penmanship business, let alone contributing to a Catholic “Daily Reflections” column. From the world of psychology, more commonly referenced in the entrepreneurial world, the general class of such a feeling is known as the Imposter Phenomenon. It is a modern take on an older Greek word, hypokrites, which means an actor. Webster’s describes it as a noun that translates literally from two words in Greek that mean “an interpreter from underneath” (Ancient Greek actors read their lines from underneath a mask). So presented with the imperative of Mt 5:48, knowing what I am and how spectacularly capable I am at failing in my daily spiritual battles, I cannot help but feel like I am on a ledge somewhere in ancient Greece, reciting lines. The imposter in me plays a role, reading and writing lines, from beneath a mask, which covers the real me.
Journeys over Spiritual Distances
I have come to recognize that there are separate journeys over two different spiritual distances to be made in one’s life. First, there is a finite spiritual distance between my real self, what lies underneath the mask, and what I choose to expose to the world, my false self, the mask itself. Making this journey is fortunately simple. When graced by His goodness, I find the courage to tear away the false self in the confessional. It is between the visits to confessionals (from the moment I step out of it) that I find myself regrowing the skin of that false self. As I have written in the past (See GVM, “The Simulacrum”, Sep 3, 2021), the danger lies in the permanent accretion of some, particularly hard-to-shed layers, of that false self. This brings me to the second and greater of these spiritual distances – the one between my current, real self, underneath that mask, and what God has desired it to be, my true self. While it is the journey over this distance that troubles me the most, fortunately, there is a way. We will discuss its ease and comfort in a moment.
Choosing to Be Perfect
There is another sense in which we may consider the imperative of Mt 5:48. When read contextually with Mt 5:44 ( “Love your enemies”), it hints at an imitation of God’s mercy, which in its perfection, (Mt 5:45) “makes His sun rise on the bad and the good and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust”. I wish that “scholar of the law” (Lk 10:25-29) has also asked the question, “Who is my enemy”? I would like to believe that Jesus would have answered it in two parts – The first, “whoever you choose to make your enemy” and second, “your real self underneath your mask”. In other words, we choose our enemies, and we choose to remain our masked selves.
Thus, to make this second journey to my God-willed true self, I need to reflect towards my bipartite enemy, the same mercy God shows me in every visit to the confessional. For so long as I do not, I burden myself with that terrible yoke of unforgiveness that bears down on that journey, whence failure is assured. But, when I replace it with the yoke of Christ (Mt 11:28), that is easy, I receive a burden light. It is then that I make real progress on that journey to my true self. The yoke of Christ is mercy and forgiveness. It is active and perfecting. Jesus is not sitting on some high perch mocking us. It is a knowing smile on his face. He knows how amused we will be when we come to truly understand that mercy and forgiveness are choices, they are acts of the will, which destroy that bipartite enemy. That is the easy way to fulfilling that imperative. Amen.
