The Word in Focus with Dr Larry Taylor

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)

Perfect. Teleios (τέλειος): complete, fully mature, reaching toward the end goal, whole, journeying towards culmination. Teleios is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point, the goal of evolution, the result of God’s plan. Teleios does not imply that there’s no room for growth, or nothing left to learn.

The Bible could be titled, “God’s Great Rescue Project.” God created the universe separate from Godself, but with the potential to become one with God, fully united with the divine – everything redeemed, all things made new, shalom. All creation is on a journey towards teleios. 

Ah, but creation depends on humans. Nature cannot attain teleios without human beings using their freewill to choose to join God on the journey towards wholeness. All creation groans, waiting for the manifestation of the children of God. To have “dominion” over nature means to carefully steward creation.

God is the teleios. God is whole and complete within Godself. That is not to imply, however, that God is distant or unmoved by suffering. Conversely, God is a person of sorrows, acquainted with grief. 

Within Godself there is radical communal wholeness. Father, Son, and Spirit continually pouring out altruistic, other-oriented love for each other. In God’s essence, God is community, engaged in perichoresis, dancing, flowing around in mutual movement, mutual indwelling, and mutual sacrificial love.

The perfect love of the Triune God spilled over. God wanted to create something other than Godself. God could not create anything as teleios, complete, because to do so would be simply to create God. God created something other than God (the cosmos) with the potential of uniting with God.

God did not create perfection. God brought forth a good creation out of chaos, crowned it with humans bearing the imago Dei, and having free moral agency. Humans are free to make real choices that have real consequences. God is not a puppeteer. 

Many of us have mistakenly thought that God created a perfect world; we humans screwed it up, and now God must make it perfect again. God did not create a perfect world. God created a good world, put humans in charge of it, and invited the humans to join God in a process that would result in a perfect world.

That process involves humans willingly joining the process that leads to oneness with God. A perfect world would be a world in which everything and everyone is perfectly united to God. We humans decided, however, that we did not want to be united to God. We wanted to do what is right in our own eyes, decide for ourselves how to run things. The results are all around us – wars, killing, violence, bombs, starvation, environmental pollution, prejudice, racism, xenophobia, protective exclusivism, dictators, nationalism, kakistocracy, oligarchy, greed.

Humanity lives under the fear of death while simultaneously loving death. If we didn’t love death, there would be no militarized police forces, masked ICE agents, missiles, or bombs. We reject the way of Messiah that eschews violence, washes feet, takes the lower place, turns the cheek, cheerfully goes extra miles, and would rather die than kill. Our preachers explain away the clear teachings of Jesus, telling us that he certainly did not mean what he said.

God could wipe it all out and start over. God could let it all go its own way, which inevitably would lead to self-destruction. With our nuclear arsenals and environmental rape, we are at the brink.

God elected to become human, to join with creation. Jesus lived as every human was meant to live – in constant connectedness with God. Jesus was/is teleios – the complete human, the complete Jew, the new Israel, the second Adam. 

He did not have to die. He chose to die. He laid down his life so he could pick it up again. He entered death on behalf of all creation; all sin imploded in his breast; the snake’s head was crushed; death died. Good Friday sent shockwaves reverberating through the cosmos. Everything changed.

From the divine perspective, it is finished. All things new. Teleios. All sin is gone. The satan is defeated. Death died. There is no future war to be won. All was settled at the cross. Karl Barth was once asked when he was saved, to which he replied, “32 AD.”

In the realm of our existence, locked in by space-time, we perceive a long gap between the victory of Good Friday and the earthly peaceable Kingdom Jesus’ Parousia. But God is wholly other. God is not confined to space-time. The poet strained to express it – a thousand years are but a day to God. 

On a practical level, this means that all sin is banished and expunged. We are fully loved and fully accepted. We are invited to join the divine perichoresis, to be united with Jesus, learning from Jesus how to be like Jesus. God created us “very good,” but not perfect. God invites us on a journey towards teleios. Presenting our bodies as living sacrifices in full surrender to grace, we are infused with the Holy Spirit and equipped to live by the Sermon on the Mount. 

We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:22-23)

Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.