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carrying someone’s burden another mile (Matt 5:39, 41) are acts of spiritual aggression; they are not passive, but are profoundly confrontational, in a spiritual manner. Dropping the desire for “an eye for an eye,” actually praying and wishing well for one’s persecutors (Matt 5:38; 44), is very difficult to do, but you do it “so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (5:45). Presumably this has an evangelical motive: to convert the persecutor, turn the Saul into a Paul, causing the centurion to notice that one is “a son of God” (Matt 27:54, NRSV margin10).

      The immediate context, then, speaks of selfless love, non-retaliation, and being children of God. The bigger context of Matthew 5–6 speaks of hungering for truth, being “pure in heart” (5:8—something that is possible, then), shining light upon the world, exceeding a Pharisaic righteousness, avoiding anger, not praying bombastically, praying for God’s will, being full of light, not loving money, and trusting God. It is a sermon about wholehearted sincerity, forgiveness, service, trust, and humility. If we look at the larger context, perfection seems to refer to these values of trust in God and kindness toward all, while the immediate context narrows this down to the ethics of nonviolence and love, even of enemies. Both of these are consistent with the emphasis on honesty and good works that one finds throughout the Gospel of Matthew.

      Scholars have often been consumed with questions of verbal tense and mood in Matt 5:48. The verb ἔσεσθε is a future indicative, middle voice. Is it intended to function as a future (in which case, it should have been translated “you will be perfect”) or is it functioning as present imperative (as the future indicative often does)? This one is fairly easy to answer. All the main verbs in vv. 39–42 are imperatives, and the indicatives in the verses that follow are all expressing support for the imperatives of those verses: “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?” (v. 46)—implying, “go further, love your enemies.” The force of verse 48, then, is imperative: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (NRSV).

      It seems to be based on some Leviticus passages: “be holy, for I am holy”; or “be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 11:44, 45; 19:2; cf. 20:26). In Leviticus, the original meaning of “holy” (separate, numinous, divine, and dangerous) still holds. The commands in Leviticus are given to Moses or to Moses and Aaron, and transmitted from them to the Israelites. Holiness in Leviticus has both a ritual and a moral side. Jesus, in Matthew, avoids this word that has so much ritual history, using instead τέλειος, a word that is usually associated with maturation, completion, even beauty. The context in Matthew suggests that the ethical implications of maturity are being emphasized.

One author insists that the saying involves “a command for the present . . . be perfect now.”11 But that would rightly be called “perfectionism,” an attitude characterized by judgmentalism and impatience with others, something that is inconsistent with the canonical portrait of Jesus, who values people’s motivations and hunger for truth.12 A perfectionist would hardly be known for spending time with tax collectors and sinners, winebibbers and (former) prostitutes. In Jesus’ day, a perfectionist would be known for ceremonial hand-washings, fasting, and other such external observances, instead of being known for rejecting those usages13 and emphasizing what comes from within.14 Therefore, it is misleading to say “Jesus will be satisfied with nothing but the highest ideal,”15 since we see that he includes people who have a less-than-perfect ideal, yet who will not “lose their reward” (Matt 10:41–42; cf. Mark 9:38–41; Luke 10:39–42). Jesus is definitely not a perfectionist, in the sense of being rigidly moralistic or insisting that things can only be done one way. He constantly shows attention to the “little people,” people with little faith, people who are not particularly “religious” in any socially-recognized way (the woman at the well, the tax collector in the tree, the shunned woman), but who come to him for spiritual waters.

      He is delighted when some needy people dismantle the roof above his head while he is in the middle of a sermon. No perfectionist could tolerate this. This shows that what matters for Jesus is not our spiritual level but our spiritual direction, not our proximity to perfection but our desire for it. He grants forgiveness to the paralyzed man and his friends who lowered him down through the roof because he recognizes their spirituality—“Jesus saw their faith” (Mark 2:5; Matt 9:2)—and he responds to their motivation—“Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven” (Matt 9:2).

      Spiritual desire, direction, and motive are more relevant to the perfection quest than are one’s actual achievements or outward and apparent “perfection.” You will go to God if you want to go to God.

      The reader may be frustrated with the absence of a concrete answer to the question “what, exactly, is this perfection? What is its content?” This is often the case with the gospel: we are given a taste, offered a principle, pointed in the right direction, but the full disclosure of its content is only found in one’s personal experience. The whole gospel message suggests that perfecting includes a maturation of character, a thorough inculcation of honesty, and a motive of kindness directed at service to others. Matt 5:48 summarizes this as becoming more like the heavenly Father. This saying is not a departure from, but a fulfillment of, the rest of the Lord’s teaching as found in the New Testament.

      We found that the Lukan saying of a kingdom within draws attention to God’s activity within the believer’s mind, values (“treasure”), and experience. Matt 5:48 goes further, implying the perfecting of behavior, character, and faithfulness. The Lukan passage alerts us to where it all begins, the Matthean passage tells us where it all is headed.

      You are gods

John 10:34–35, where Jesus quotes a psalm that says “you are gods” and affirms that this is said of “those to whom the word of God came,” needs to be considered contextually. Jesus is being challenged for claiming to have divine power, and his comeback is to draw attention to a unique and startling passage in the OT that seems to say that people have divinity, can even be called elohim, “gods” (translating literally). Many hundreds of years before Jesus, when the psalm was composed, the elohim were an “an assembly of gods” over whom Yahweh ruled.16 This would not, however, be the view of Jesus or of any first century Jew. He may have had the notion of a council of angels or heavenly beings who assist the Lord, but that is not relevant here, because Psalm 82 and John 10 both refer to humans in connection with elohim.

More relevant than the antique history of elohim would be the views of the midrashim (closer to Jesus’ time) on this passage, so we turn to Jerome Neyrey’s study of midrashic comments on Psalm 82. The midrashic authors understood elohim to refer to deathlessness and holiness. God wanted to give deathlessness to the Israelites (“that the Angel of Death should have no dominion over them”17), but they lost this offer by sinning: “you have corrupted your conduct: ‘SURELY YE SHALL DIE LIKE MEN’ (Ps 82:7).”18 Although the midrashim understand God to be speaking the words of the psalm at Sinai, the “doctrine of the relation of sin and death” that underlies it comes from Gen 1–3; it is Adam who was deathless and holy, and who lost this status when he sinned.19 Neyrey sees the Johannine Jesus assuming the Sinai setting, as well. “Those to whom the word of God came” (John 10:35) refers to the Exodus generation. Neyrey thinks that, for Jesus as for the midrashim, holiness implied deathlessness. Holiness provides “the ground for calling someone, Israel or Jesus, god.”20 Further, deathlessness is an essential teaching in John: “anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life” (John 5:24).

      Neyrey’s analysis illuminates some aspects of this passage quite well. The application of elohim to human beings ceases to be incomprehensible when it is understood as a label for people who receive the divine quality of deathlessness. In John, Jesus always had that divine quality; he was with God in the beginning, and was in fact the co-creator of “all things” (John 1:1–3).

      But, while Neyrey demonstrates a midrashic connection of the elohim label to deathlessness, and discusses the Christology of 10:36 (the one sent by God is divine), he cannot connect these two points—because they are not connected in this passage, even though deathlessness is a major Johannine teaching. In John 10, people are not called elohim because of deathlessness. Jesus’ point is much more bold; he is making a divinity connection. When he connects

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