One of them was – well, actually, several of my first experiences were – helping people with the purchase of condominiums. That was eye-opening. When you buy a regular home or property, there’s a lot of paperwork involved. When you buy a condominium, it triples – at least. It was daunting, and when the condominium was a newly built property being sold by the developer, there was even more paperwork to read, and there were other concepts and issues – New Home Warranties, Shadow Mortgages, and other things – that I hadn’t heard of and didn’t really understand.
“Daunting” is too simple a word for all that; but I had no choice. This was my job. I soldiered through it. And somehow, I figured out what I needed to know and to do and helped complete those transactions successfully.
Today, nearly thirty years later, I know condominium law almost entirely, inside and out. I am called a “condominium lawyer”. I’ve not only helped people buy and sell them, I’ve helped developers plan, construct, and register them. I get hired by some condominiums to help them sort out very difficult situations, and in my additional role on the Condominium Authority Tribunal, I get to make judgements about them. It took time, but though I started out almost clueless and unprepared, now I am called an expert.
That’s what our progress in the church and gospel is and ought to be like.
When Jesus spoke in what we call the Sermon on the Mount, he concluded a significant portion of it with this commandment,
“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”
Sometimes we struggle over the meaning of that statement. It sounds, well, impossible, doesn’t it? How in the world can we be perfect? Isn’t perfection only for eternity? And, so, we comfort ourselves with that interpretation – that, “ah, he was talking about eternity,” about becoming perfect later on.
This is what President Nelson, when he was still a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, offered us in his talk, “Perfection Pending”. He turned to the Biblical Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written, to find that the word that they used, which we translate as “perfect”, was “teleios”.
Teleios, he explained, “is an adjective derived from the noun telos, which means ‘end.’ The infinitive form of the verb is teleiono, which means ‘to reach a distant end, to be fully developed, to consummate, or to finish.’ Please note,” he said, “that the word does not imply ‘freedom from error’; it implies ‘achieving a distant objective.’” And so, Elder Nelson concluded that genuine perfection is something that awaits us in the future, post-resurrection, thanks to the atonement of Jesus Christ. “Perfection,” he said, “consists in gaining eternal life—the kind of life that God lives.”
That is true doctrine. That is our ultimate path and goal. But what happens if we read Jesus’ words not as speaking about some future objective we sometime hope we can accomplish, but, in the way it sounds, in its grammatical and semantic context, as a present-tense, do-it-now kind of commandment? What would it mean for us then?
Considered as if Jesus was speaking in the present tense to his listeners then, as I believe they would have heard him to be doing, we note that the commandment follows after and concludes a list of things we are expected to do in order to be, as Jesus put it, more righteous than the pharisees, to live the law of God better than those who lived it most strictly. He said:
- Don’t just not kill; don’t be angry.
- Don’t just not be angry; don’t hold onto anger; be reconciled with your enemy.
- Don’t just not commit adultery; don’t lust.
- In fact, if you have any inclination of the body that leads you astray, fix it, at all costs.
- Don’t look for reasons to leave your marriages; unless it is irreparably damaged, such as by adultery or abuse, stick around and fix it. Your relationships matter.
- Don’t make false oaths or overstate your promises; be simple, honest, and direct in your speech, and mean what you say.
- And don’t bring God’s name into it when you do make a promise – it is your own integrity that matters.
- Don’t settle for being justified and treated fairly; give more than you owe, suffer more than you deserve, help more than is asked of you.
- “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”
And then, capping all that off, he says, as if to conclude and summarize them,
“be ye therefore perfect…”
But Jesus wasn’t speaking English and he wasn’t being scientific. Jesus also wasn’t speaking in Greek. He was speaking Aramaic, and in that language the word from which the writers of the New Testament translated, when using the word teleios, was the word, gmeera.
Gmeera is like teleios. It means a perfection that is the achievement of an end, the fulfillment of a path; but unlike the usually lofty and philosophical language of the Greeks, the Aramaic word also had a practical, everyday, here-and-now, accessible kind of use: It also meant, an expert. A gmeera person was a genuine expert. Someone who is not just a technician capable of applying rules correctly, but who has studied and understood and knows how to apply the underlying principles of their profession or trade. President Nelson, for example, was a gmeera heart surgeon, one of the best in his field, who truly understood both the science and underlying substance of his work. He knew both what to do for the heart, and why to do it. I would be called a gmeera condominium lawyer. I have an understanding of not just the procedures related to making, organizing, running, and selling condominiums, but of the principles and purposes that inform them. And God is a gmeera God.
That is, God knows not just how to make worlds, but the principles and purposes for which to make them. He is not a technocrat or bureaucrat seeking procedural compliance without deeper meaning or understanding. He gets it. He gets everything. We can barely begin to get what he gets, or know as he knows. As he told the prophet Samuel, “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” And through the prophet Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways… As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” And then, just read the Lord’s lengthy response to Job (Job 38-41) to demonstrate that there is nothing man knows that God does not know even better. He is gmeera indeed. He is as expert as it gets.
And, yes, as President – then Elder – Nelson has said, we aren’t going to have that kind of perfection here and now, but if we are to take seriously Jesus’ commandment in its present tense meaning, as he delivered it back then, we have to conclude that somehow he nevertheless expects us to be like that. Now. And I believe him. I believe we can.
I believe that Jesus’ commandment to be perfect consists in this:
We are to be like him; we are to follow him, who, when he came into this mortal world, to bear the kind of weak human frame and frailities that we also bear, he nevertheless modelled his life, his words, his work, and his behaviour, after the example of his and our Eternal Heavenly Father.
Following Christ is therefore following Heavenly Father;
being like Jesus Christ is being like Heavenly Father.
And being like them means being gmeera now in the context in which he has placed us, and particularly, based on the where his commandment sits in his Sermon on the Mount, what this means, in particular, is to be gmeera with respect to the gospel law, gmeera followers, gmeera disciples, of Jesus Christ.
What does it mean to be a perfect, or gmeera, disciple of Jesus Christ? Does it mean to be flawlessly righteous in all that we do? If so, what is the purpose in his continuing mercy and grace? Do we cease to be his followers simply because we must depend on the ritual of the Sacrament each week, to help us reflect, and remember, and repent?
No, it is clear that being gmeera as a follower of Jesus Christ, is not about being exacting and flawless; what it is about, is being enduring and faithful. Our perfection as saints and followers of Christ, includes our faith in and dependence on him for that perfection. As Moroni says, we are perfected “in Christ”.
Repentance, and repenting, are part of perfect discipleship.
Following Jesus, because we ourselves do not yet perfectly know the way, is part of
perfect discipleship.
We are perfect in our discipleship, when we depend on him for
our perfection.
And, in particular, we are made perfect in our discipleship, and in
eternity, when we make and strive to keep covenants with him, entering
into a binding, personal relationship whereby we seek and receive his
enabling and ennobling grace.
Being on the covenant path, with sincerity, understanding, and faith, is to be on the path and in the midst of perfection.
Now, none of this means you can have faith in God and rest on your laurels. It’s not a one-and-done deal. We do not accept Jesus as saviour and be baptized and say the work is over, the war is won, and that there is nothing more that we need to do. That’s not gmeera discipleship.
Once, I struggled with a serious sin, a serious problem that afflicted my life in ways that were destructive, spiritually and emotionally, for me and everyone I loved. I was forced to beg before the Lord for forgiveness, for understanding, and for strength to overcome. I pleaded and I wept, and I won. I remember the feeling, an instantaneous and perfect freedom. Forgiveness, yes, but more importantly, escape, release, and strength.
We read in the scriptures where King Benjamin’s people “all cried with one voice, saying: Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually.” That’s what it felt like. That’s what it was. But that’s not how the story ended.
We know that’s not how it ended for the Nephites either. Though they then entered into “a covenant with … God to do his will, and to be obedient to his commandments in all things that he shall command … all the remainder of [their] days,” they didn’t always keep it up. The Book of Mormon, as does the Bible, shares completely the story of cycles of virtue and sin, waves of righteousness and accomplishment followed by periods of pride and failure. Well, that’s how it was for me too.
I rested on my laurels. I basked in the grace of God, but I did not do the work of earning the qualities of character, the consistency of conviction, or the perfection of practice, that His grace gave me the chance to do. And so, my struggles, in time, returned, and I needed to repent all over again. And this time, it was a harder, longer road that I had to walk, because, as I have done too many times in my life, I took his grace for granted, and did not choose to grow.
Our task as followers of Jesus Christ is to become gmeera disciples, to be, therefore, perfect. We must make the effort to learn, know, and apply now the principles of that eternal life which is to come. Isn’t this what President Nelson admonishes us to do when he tells us to “think celestial” and to “let God prevail”?
I admit, I’m not a fan of sloganized versions of the gospel, but that pithy phrase – Think Celestial – has a true and eternal ring to it. I believe it means exactly what Jesus was saying when he said, “Be ye therefore perfect.”
Thinking celestial today means seeking and striving for expert discipleship – repenting of our sins, reconciling our disagreements, loving our families, loving our enemies, bridling our passions – and doing all this with faith, understanding, and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, in his atonement, and in his grace, his kindness, his love, his help, and his support for us. This is path to, and the substance of, eternal life.
The prophet, Nephi, said:
Wherefore, do the things which I have told you I have seen that your Lord and your Redeemer should do; for, for this cause have they been shown unto me, that ye might know the gate by which ye should enter. For the gate by which ye should enter is repentance and baptism by water; and then cometh a remission of your sins by fire and by the Holy Ghost. |
Today, just about 2000 years ago, Jesus rode triumphantly into Jerusalem while people strewed palm fronds onto the ground before him, signifying their recognition that He was their one, true, and long awaited king.
We know how the story then unfolded. In the week that followed, the week we now acknowledge as Holy Week, Jesus revisited his temple and found it desecrated. He was betrayed by one of his closest friends, abandoned by others whose fear overcame their faith when they watched him taken, arrested, mocked, beaten, and finally crucified.
But they were not entirely without faith. They were his true disciples. Despite their fears and failures, they pressed forward in their faith. They continued to meet together, to support one another, and to wait upon the wisdom and revelation of God.
And He was not without forgiveness. So, upon his resurrection, he appeared to them, he spoke with them, he comforted them, and called them to continue in the work of laying the foundation for his kingdom through which all people would be saved. And leaving them again he left them with the promise of the comforting gift and enabling strength of the Holy Ghost, by which they would receive revelation, inspiration, understanding, and power to carry out his work.
It is my belief and my testimony, that those disciples are, for us, examples of gmeera discipleship, of what Christ means when he calls to be perfect; that it is a perfection that is grounded in grace and depends upon the doctrine of Jesus Christ, which is that He came into the world to do the will of his father and ours, as our suffering saviour, to bring healing and hope to the human family, to invite each of us to come unto him, to be healed by him, and to be lifted up by his grace to the place and perfection in which he dwells, and, being brought up there, to then continue to rely upon his grace to enable us to love and serve one another in patient fellowship and faithfulness eternally.
I believe this is what Jesus meant when he commanded us to be perfect, that this is the nature of true discipleship, and that this is the faithful path and practice that are the source and substance of eternal life.
In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.