Tag: perfect

Perfect

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Matthew 5:43-48
God, how shall I be perfect
as your perfection calls
whose light strikes mead and desert,
who makes the rain to fall?

To love who sins against me,
who wounds me, then to bless,
as you have loved your enemies,
as you have loved myself?

Can anyone fulfill this?
For who can be like God?
You, you alone can do it—
unless you touch our hearts.

Unless you heal that hardness
that turns all hope to fear,
unless in love you pardon us
and touch our eyes and ears.

Have mercy on my blindness,
though you are God Who Sees,
and in your loving kindness
have mercy, too, on me.

And let me, too, have mercy;
let me hear those who call.
Your rain falls on the thirsting;
your light shines on us all.

 Rain near the village Lunde, The north of Funen, Denmark by Malene Thyssen, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Malene CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=276654

Not Perfect

“You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have?
Do not the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet your brothers only,
what is unusual about that?
Do not the pagans do the same?
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Matthew 5:38-48
The sun you made shines on us, bad and good;
your rain turns field and fallow both to mud.
You water weeds and wheat; you give them light,
and love us when we're wrong, as much as right.

This is the love you ask us in return:
to love the ice and love the fire that burns;
to love the noontime and the deep of night;
with all the stars to shed alike our light;

so to be wounded when our love is spurned;
so to be frozen; so, too, to be burned;
pierced by the sun and blinded by the dark;
shining on all the same our brief, bright spark.

Is this a weight that mortal flesh can bear?
Not since we've known what good and evil were.
How shall we carry love for all the world?
O, help the wheat, and help the weeds, my Lord!

Let what I am grow ever toward your light,
both in the sun and in the stars of night.
I am not perfect, and I am not just,
but pour your mercy down upon my dust.

Rain falling on a field, in southern Estonia By Aleksander Kaasik – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63681273