Perfection: Its Meaning and Limits
Question:
The Bible says, “Be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
What is this perfection, and how does a person attain it? And when do we say of a person that he is perfect?
Answer:
Absolute perfection belongs to God alone, and no human being can attain it, because we all fall short when weighed in the balance.
As for the perfection that a person can attain, it is relative perfection.
It is the measure of perfection that he can reach according to his abilities and capabilities, and according to the degree of grace granted to him.
The Lord said of Job the righteous that he was a perfect and upright man.
He feared God and turned away from evil. And He said that there was none like him on the earth (Job 1:1, 8). Of course, Job’s perfection was relative, not absolute perfection.
In this sense, Noah was a righteous and perfect man (Gen. 6:9).
And Jacob was a perfect man (Gen. 25:27), even though he had some weaknesses. Yet God judges each person according to his abilities, his age and level, and according to the work of the Spirit within him.
Perfection may also be relative to a particular commandment, as when the Lord Christ said to the rich young man, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor” (Matt. 19:21).
Our duty is to strive toward perfection, but we should not say that we have attained it. For perfection has degrees; whenever a person reaches one of them, he discovers another perfection, higher and farther beyond him, awaiting him. He is like one pursuing the horizon.
Consider the Apostle Paul, who ascended to the third heaven and labored more than all the apostles. He says:
“Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, if, perhaps, I may apprehend… I do one thing: forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead” (Phil. 3:12–15).
If the great Saint Paul did not consider himself to have become perfect, but rather strove in the hope of attaining it, what then shall we say of ourselves?
Yet immediately afterward Paul says, “Therefore let all of us who are perfect think this way,” meaning all those who consider themselves to have become perfect, or all those whom people regard as perfect.
A student in elementary school may receive the highest grade in mathematics, and people may say that he is perfect relative to that level, while he may understand nothing at the higher level. In the same way, he may advance from the level of perfection in elementary school to perfection in preparatory school, then secondary school, and then university… All of this is relative perfection. Yet he does not consider himself to have become perfect in mathematics, because there are still higher levels beyond him.
An article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III, published in El-Keraza Magazine, Ninth Year, Issue 42, October 20, 1978.
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