What Is the Goal?

My husband, Chris, found this puzzle piece this week – actually, he found where I stashed it. I put it in a little cup that a dear friend gave us when Nicholas was born; the cup sits on a shelf of our buffet, so the piece is always close by. I put it there for safe keeping because an incomplete puzzle is a terrible thing. How many of you have gotten near the end of the puzzle and had to go on the great search? One piece is missing. Everyone checks their sleeves. They rise from their chairs and brush off, beginning to scan the floor. If necessary, a flashlight is retrieved to check under nearby furniture. And, at my house, the cup on the buffet is checked. The puzzle is not finished until the last piece is clicked in and tapped twice.

In the second half of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is finishing the puzzle of the law. The pieces have all been there. Long ago, you were instructed not to murder, but the complete picture of God’s vision for humanity won’t be complete until you are not only not killing each other, but not wanting to. In fact, if you want to be in right relationship with God, if you are bringing an offering to God, first, go be in right relationship with one another. Get those pieces of the puzzle in place, then come and finish with your gift to God.

You know that the law demands that you not commit adultery, but that is only part of the picture. When you crave another person, even just looking at them, you have already committed adultery in your heart.

The law has set out boundaries for relationships, like all the puzzle pieces laid out ready to be put together. You can see them all, you can see the colors on them, but you cannot see the picture of God’s vision for humanity as long as they are all separate. The purpose is not the boundaries. The purpose of a puzzle is not to break the picture into pieces. The purpose is to put it all together. The purpose is to bring people together.

Jesus shifts from recalling the law to addressing the common interpretations of the application of the law. “Do not steal” is the law, but you have heard it said, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” I say to you, how do you put the pieces back together? If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek; Jesus is still talking about responding to stealing. If someone steals from you, be vulnerable again. Resist putting up a wall that will keep them from ever being able to get close to you again. Instead of having to steal from you, give to the one who asks and don’t turn away from the one who wants to borrow.

You have heard that the intention of the law is “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. God causes the sun to rise on the good and evil and the rain to fall on good people and bad people.

If you only love those who love you, why would you expect that to be commended. That’s like sitting down to a puzzle of the Memphis skyline, putting the pieces in where the pyramid and the bridge and the First Tennessee building meet the sky, and congratulating yourself for your puzzling skills. The hard part is the blue sky and all those buildings that are about the same color and same height and the river.

The real puzzle-work is loving those who don’t love you. Treating everyone equally like God does. God causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on everyone. Everyone gets what they need to grow.

Finally, Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The word we translate “perfect” is the same word that Jesus utters again as he breaths his last breath, bows his head, and gives up his spirit. There, we have translated it, “It is finished.”

As I have reflected on these two phrases this week, I have swapped the words. “Be finished, therefore, as your heavenly Father is finished.” And “It is perfect.” Wow – the power of translation and the inadequacy of any one word to capture what Jesus was saying. The root word is teleios which means complete, perfect, mature, or whole.

Teleios is related to the word telos, which means the end, the conclusion, the goal. To be teleios is to have reached telos, to come to the end of a process, or to be perfected.

When you are doing a puzzle, the goal, the telos, is a finished puzzle. Putting the final piece in is teleios, reaching the goal.

So Jesus, says, reach the goal, as your Father in heaven has reached the goal. What is the goal? Here’s where we are encouraged to look at the box and cheat to get the picture right. Jesus is the picture on the box. The goal is to look like him, act like him, think like him, …love like him.

N.T. Wright says of the Sermon on the Mount, “This was the blueprint for [Jesus’s] own life. He asks nothing of his followers that he hasn’t faced himself. And, within his own life, we can already sense a theme that will grow larger and larger until we can’t miss it. If this is the way to show what God is really like, and if this is the pattern that Jesus himself followed exactly, Matthew is inviting us to draw the conclusion: that in Jesus we see the Emmanuel, the God-with-us person. The Sermon on the Mount isn’t just about how to behave. It’s about discovering the living God in the loving, and dying, Jesus, and learning to reflect that love ourselves into the world that needs it so badly.”

It is not easy to let go of our right to not love. It is not easy to be vulnerable when we have been hurt. It is not easy to let God transform our hearts. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis compares it to going to the dentist. He writes, “When I was a child I often had toothache, and I knew that if I went to my mother she would give me something which would deaden the pain for that night and let me get to sleep. But I did not go to my mother—at least, not till the pain became very bad. And the reason I did not go was this. I did not doubt she would give me the aspirin; but I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to the dentist the next morning. I could not get what I wanted out of her without getting something more, which I did not want. I wanted immediate relief from pain: but I could not get it without having my teeth set permanently right. And I knew those dentists: I knew they started fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth which had not yet begun to ache. They would not let sleeping dogs lie, if you gave them and inch they took an ell – an ell is from your fingertips to your elbow….Now, if I may put it that way, Our Lord is like the dentists. If you give Him an inch, he will take an ell.”

The scribes and the Pharisees had the inch down, but Jesus said, “unless your righteousness exceeds [theirs], you will never enter the kingdom of [God].” There is more to the picture than the sum of its pieces. The law is more than don’t kill, don’t commit adultery, don’t bear false witness…it just drills out the cavity. There is a lot more to curing the ache. There is a lot more to God’s vision for you and for me, and for the world.

As we approach Lent this year, I encourage you to consider how you will let God work on you. There is an opportunity to make a plan in your bulletin today. Will you participate in daily devotion with Scripture, reflection, and prayer? Will you participate in a small group to talk honestly about how hard it is to let God be a dentist in your life drilling out the rotten places – the places of hurt, of anger, of hate, of scorn; to talk about the picture you see developing in your life as you put the pieces together; to listen to each other and support each other and enjoy fellowship together? The reality is, a lot of our life is like a major part of the Memphis skyline, it’s as murky as the muddy Mississippi, and it is hard to get all those pieces reconnected in the right order. But, it is beautiful when we are done.

Our goal in life is to be complete, consistent all the way across, for the pieces of our lives all fit together, to love like God loves. One draft sermon title for today was “from eggs to apples” because the phrase, “from soup to nuts” kept running through my head. So, I got curious about where that phrase originated. From soup to nuts comes from the full-course dinner served during the 1800s, which typically started with a soup course and ended with port served with nuts. A full course dinner could be up to 16 courses. The term from soup to nuts has its roots in the Latin phrase ab ovo usque ad mala which means from egg to apple, which were the first and last foods served in a Roman multi-course meal.

“Be finished,” says Jesus, love like God loves, and then he showed us how God loves, hanging on the cross, and in his last breath declaring, “it is perfect.”

Will you reach your teleios, will you be complete, will you love as God loves, from egg to apple, or will there always be a piece missing?