Does Jesus Really Expect Us to Be Perfect?

A Standard of Perfection

Jesus’s words in Matthew 5:48 register a ten on the biblical Richter scale, sending shockwaves through any soul throughout church history: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” This is a disturbing statement and high calling, rivaled only by Jesus’s words a few verses earlier: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:20).

As a result, many Christians have interpreted Jesus’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount as a message of law, showing that no one can even dream of having a relationship with God apart from Jesus’s intervening death and granting us his own righteousness. While at a fundamental level it is true that all people stand condemned and experience death because of sin, with our only hope being God’s grace toward us (Rom. 5:8–19; Eph. 2:1–10), this is not at all what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 5.

The statements in Matthew 5:20 and Matthew 5:48 are meant to shock and shake us out of self-reliance and lethargy, but their message is not one of condemnation. Rather, they are an invitation. The problem with our interpretation of Matthew 5:48 is an English one, and the problem with our understanding of Matthew 5:20 comes from not paying close attention to the literary structure. We will examine these problems and their answers in turn.

Perfection as Wholeness

In Matthew 5:48 the word we translate “perfect” (teleios) is better understood as “whole” or “consistent.”¹ The family of tel– words in Greek includes a variety of meanings, but dominant and central is the notion of “wholeness” or “completeness.” In the Septuagint, the tel- group is often used as a good translation for the Hebrew terms shalom (“flourishing,” “wholeness”) and tamim (“wholeness,” “integrity”), which is often used synonymously with yashar (“upright”) and tsaddiq (“righteous”). In Deuteronomy 18:13, for example, the Levites are exhorted to be dedicated to the Lord, not practicing idolatry, which is described as “blameless” (tamimv) meaning wholeheartedly and singular in their devotion to God, not other gods. It does not mean the Levites were sinless people—the whole atoning system was still necessary—but that they were to be singular in their dedication.

Throughout the Old Testament and into the Second Temple Jewish literature, this notion of having an undivided, wholeness of heart in relation to God is the macro-concept that sums up God’s moral commands. Scholar Peter Gentry argues convincingly that despite the common assumption that “holiness” denotes “separateness, otherness, and moral purity,” the core sense of “holy” in Hebrew (qadosh) or Greek (hagios) is actually devotedness, singular dedication. “The basic meaning of the word is ‘consecrated’ or ‘devoted.’ In Scripture it operates within the context of covenant relationships and expresses commitment.” He goes on to note that this does not mean that “holy” is completely unrelated to moral purity, but instead “holiness should not be defined as moral purity, but rather purity is the result of being completely devoted to God as defined by the covenant.”² Another scholar has discussed it as the difference between “separation from” and “separation to,” with the latter, rather than the former, being the idea of holiness.³

This is the context and meaning of Jesus’s statement in Matthew 5:48. Jesus is not telling people to be perfect in the sense of sinless. There is no place in the Bible after Genesis 3 that expects any person to be sinless; this is impossible. The sacrificial system is in place in the Mosaic covenant and then fulfilled through Jesus in the new covenant for a reason. Post-fall humans are never free of mistakes, failures, blindness, and sins of both omission and commission. This is true even of those who are now united with Christ and coheirs with him, who have the Holy Spirit and who stand in a secure, covenantal relationship with God. Our own resurrection into the new creation is the only time when we will finally be free.

Nevertheless, the constant exhortation toward God-imitating holiness in both the Old and New Testaments is not an empty and impossible task. God is not like the sixth-grade playground bully who holds the second-grader at a distance with an outstretched arm encouraging him to punch while the youngster’s short arms only hit the air. Nor is God merely informing us of our inability to be holy and righteous—high demands that show us our failures.

All of this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what holiness and righteousness mean in the Bible. For a human to be holy and to do righteousness means to be dedicated to God and his ways. This will always be worked out imperfectly and inconsistently because we remain sinful humans, but the call is still real and a possibility. To be human is to be limited—even pre-fall—so human holiness will never be identical to or coextensive with his holiness, even as the image in a mirror is not the same as the actual thing being reflected. But as image bearers, humans are to mirror God. Post-fall this image will always have rough edges, cracks, streak marks, and holes. But humans can still be holy and grow into greater image-bearing holiness through devotion to God. We can be imperfectly “perfect” if we properly understand what teleios/holiness means. It means to pursue a wholeness of life, with our understanding, affections, and actions functioning in harmony and aligned with God’s coming kingdom. This was true in the Old Testament and is even more so in the New Testament because of the work of the Holy Spirit in every believer.

Jesus’s call to “be teleios as your heavenly Father is teleios” means something and does have a sting. It reminds us that this dedicatedness to God, this wholeness of character, does not come to us naturally. We must consciously pursue it. This is a needed shock to our souls. But it is not a message of impossibly high demand nor of condemnation. We are called to be whole.

The Greater Righteousness

So what does this wholeness look like? This leads us to the other frequently misunderstood and existentially overwhelming statement in the Sermon on the Mount: Our righteousness needs to be greater than the scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 5:20). While our problem with Matthew 5:48 is a translation one, our misunderstanding of Matthew 5:20 comes from not paying attention to how Jesus explains exactly what he means in the following verses. Matthew 5:20 and Matthew 5:48 are not isolated but are actually part of one argument. To understand both requires a reframing of what God is calling his people to be and do.

Especially in the Protestant tradition, Jesus’s provocative statement in Matthew 5:20 is often written off in a way similar to Matthew 5:48. Sinful humans obviously can’t be righteous; therefore, this must be highlighting our inability and need for Christ’s imputed righteousness. While the beautiful truth of having Christ’s righteousness credited to us is part of the Christian message (Rom. 4:6–7; 5:9; 2 Cor. 5:21), this has nothing to do with Jesus’s exhortation in Matthew 5:20. To understand what Jesus means you must keep reading. Throughout 5:21–7:12 he explains exactly what he means by this greater righteousness.

This dedicatedness to God, this wholeness of character, does not come to us naturally. We must consciously pursue it.

But before we examine that, it will be helpful to briefly note what Matthew means by righteousness and understand who the scribes and Pharisees were. The normal and most frequent meaning of “righteousness” throughout the Old and New Testaments is not difficult to ascertain. It means doing what is right. From a biblical perspective, what is right is what reflects who God is because he is the Creator of the whole world. The normal sense of being righteous or doing what is right means to do God’s will. This should not come as a surprise or seem odd. It only seems abnormal because of the Protestant tradition’s rightly placed emphasis on Christ’s imputed righteousness that becomes reductionistic if it is assumed to be the only sense of “righteousness.” The core and frequent sense of righteousness throughout the whole Bible means simply doing the will of God, something that God understandably desires and expects of his people. Obedience is not the opposite of grace or gospel. As with being “perfect” or whole, this is an ideal to constantly pursue but with the understanding that we will always exercise righteousness and do God’s will imperfectly and inconsistently, hence the need to constantly be exhorted to do it.

The scribes and Pharisees in Jesus’s day were by all accounts righteous people in this normal sense. They were the conservatives of the day who were dedicated to God’s revealed will in Scripture, who studied it and taught it to others. They fasted and tithed diligently. They were pastor-theologians who led and instructed God’s covenantal people in his will regarding the Sabbath, dietary restrictions, and care for the poor. This is what makes Jesus’s statement so shocking. Anyone who wants to enter the kingdom of heaven must be more righteous than them. This is a tall order for anyone but especially for the uneducated, obviously imperfect group of people who were listening to and following Jesus. Maybe some in Jesus’s original crowd felt like we do today, tempted to interpret his statement as impossible and overwhelming.

But Jesus is not obfuscating or condemning his hearers, nor is he giving them an impossible task. Anyone who enters the kingdom must be even more righteous than the apparently righteous scribes and Pharisees because they had the same problem we all do—the constant entropy away from wholeness, from completeness. Or another way of saying it is this: The tendency prominent especially among religious people is to externalize our righteousness, to practice our righteousness in a way that is behavioral only and not connected to our hearts or interior person. This disconnect is the opposite of being teleios, whole and complete. So the exhortation of Matthew 5:20 corresponds directly to that of Matthew 5:48.

A closer examination of the body of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:17–7:12) reveals that the call to wholeness is the consistent theme that ties the whole central part of the sermon together. Starting in Matthew 5:21, Jesus makes this requirement (exterior person plus interior person) clear. This continues through a series of examples that apply to the various aspects of being a human and being a disciple—relationships to others in the community, to God, and to the goods and people of the world.

This article is adapted from Becoming a Disciple of the King: A Theology of Matthew by Jonathan T. Pennington.

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