Merciful
Read Luke 6:1-36.
When Matthew reports this saying of Jesus, at the end of his sermon on the mount, he has it this way: "Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). When Luke reports the saying as part of the sermon on the plain, it's slightly different: "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (6:36). A lot of scholarly ink has been spilled to try to use this passage to prove that the Gospels just aren't reliable, or to say that the Gospel writers remembered it differently and therefore we don't really know what Jesus said.
But isn't it possible that Jesus preached the same sort of sermon on different occasions? And that maybe, just maybe, he said things slightly differently on different occasions? As a preacher myself I know how that works. I don't even say things exactly the same way in two different services on the same day! Jesus likely did the same thing, tweaking his messages to the crowd's needs that day.
What intrigues me, though, are the connections between "merciful" and "perfect." We have ruined the word "perfect" by understanding it as "never doing anything wrong." We talk about it in terms of performance. What if, to Jesus, "perfect" and "merciful" are two sides of the same coin? What if he's not saying something different in Luke than he said in Matthew? What if he's saying the same thing using a different word?
What if being "perfect" in God's eyes is living life in a "merciful" way?
What if perfection looks like offering food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, healing to the broken? What if perfection looks like embracing the spirit of the sabbath rather than the legalism of it? What if perfection looks like offering grace even to traitors? What if perfection looks like loving even those who are out to get you, blessing those who curse you and praying for those who seek to harm you? What if it looks like lending to even those who hate you with no expectation of return?
What if perfection looks like mercy?
What kind of world would it be if we lived like that? What kind of world would it be if even just Christians lived like that?
When Matthew reports this saying of Jesus, at the end of his sermon on the mount, he has it this way: "Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). When Luke reports the saying as part of the sermon on the plain, it's slightly different: "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (6:36). A lot of scholarly ink has been spilled to try to use this passage to prove that the Gospels just aren't reliable, or to say that the Gospel writers remembered it differently and therefore we don't really know what Jesus said.
But isn't it possible that Jesus preached the same sort of sermon on different occasions? And that maybe, just maybe, he said things slightly differently on different occasions? As a preacher myself I know how that works. I don't even say things exactly the same way in two different services on the same day! Jesus likely did the same thing, tweaking his messages to the crowd's needs that day.
What intrigues me, though, are the connections between "merciful" and "perfect." We have ruined the word "perfect" by understanding it as "never doing anything wrong." We talk about it in terms of performance. What if, to Jesus, "perfect" and "merciful" are two sides of the same coin? What if he's not saying something different in Luke than he said in Matthew? What if he's saying the same thing using a different word?
What if being "perfect" in God's eyes is living life in a "merciful" way?
What if perfection looks like offering food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, healing to the broken? What if perfection looks like embracing the spirit of the sabbath rather than the legalism of it? What if perfection looks like offering grace even to traitors? What if perfection looks like loving even those who are out to get you, blessing those who curse you and praying for those who seek to harm you? What if it looks like lending to even those who hate you with no expectation of return?
What if perfection looks like mercy?
What kind of world would it be if we lived like that? What kind of world would it be if even just Christians lived like that?
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