So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
I Corinthians 13:13
For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect.
I Corinthians 13:9
When we read I Corinthians 13:9, it seems like kind of a downer. Whatever we have is imperfect. This is true. Only God is perfect. This does not mean we live without effort. It doesn’t mean that we strive for mediocrity, since perfection is off the table.
In Matthew 5:48, Jesus tells us “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Jesus is setting a high bar for us. Again, because the alternative would be “Go ahead and be mediocre since you can never be perfect.”
Every coach in sports knows that his team won’t win every game. Yes, there are the rare college football and college basketball teams that have won every game in a season. However, even they do not win every game every season. Every coach of every team, even the worst ones, will encourage his or her team to strive to get a win in every game, in other words, to strive for perfection. However, because there is no team that is perfect all the time, there is always room for improvement. Even on the rare undefeated team, there are incomplete passes and interceptions (football) and missed baskets (basketball). The best baseball hitters have a failure rate of seventy perfect. Hitting .300 over one’s career will land one in the Hall of Fame and make a player very rich, and that’s a seventy perfect failure rate. The best hitting season of all time, when Ted Williams hit .400, that was merely a sixty percent failure rate.
God rewards effort, not success. Success that is achieved by cheating and false witness might be honored by society but will never be honored by God. And failure that results despite great effort might not score points in society but will be honored by God.
In this chapter on love in I Corinthians, St. Paul departs from love for a few verses, speaking instead about knowledge and prophecy. However, one could interject love into this verse—our love is imperfect. We do not love all people all the time. At its core meaning, sin is simply a failure to love. We cannot love and sin at the same time. At the moment we sin, even against someone we love, we are not loving them. And at the moment we are expressing love towards someone, it is impossible to sin against them. We know that our expressions of love towards others are not perfect, because we sin against even those we are closest to at times. In fact, we sin more against those we are close to than anyone else, given the multitude of opportunities. That doesn’t mean we can’t experience love, even God-like love, at moments in life. We can. Unfortunately, we can’t experience them at every moment. However, we have some sense of control over that moment when we express love or when we choose not to simply because love is a choice, just as sin is a choice, and developing a sense of self-control and discipline will help us to choose love and choose against sin.
When a person thinks he or she is perfect, they wade into a dangerous territory. First, they deceive themselves. No one is perfect. Second, when one thinks he or she is perfect, there is no incentive to improve, or in a spiritual sense, to repent. Repentance and improvement go hand in hand. Repentance helps to improve our relationship with God and with other people. The greatest commandments are to love God and to love others. Sin is when we fail to love God and fail in a relationship with someone else. Repentance is the expressed desire to improve our relationship with God and with others. And when we express desire to improve, this is how relationships grow. When an athlete wants to get better, this desire drives the outcome.
An understanding that we are imperfect when it comes to our relationship with God, combined with a desire to be perfect, will drive repentance and spiritual growth. An understanding that we can never be perfect should not make us despondent, that a goal can never be attained, but should be a lifelong motivator for repentance and spiritual growth towards God, and the deepening of relationships with other people.
Lord, You alone are perfect. I am not perfect, not in my relationship with You, not in my relationship with other people. Please forgive me when I fail to love You as I should, and for all the instances when I do not express love to my neighbor. Help me to be disciplined in my thoughts and actions today. Give me a repentant heart, and a heart that desires to be like You. Amen.
No one is perfect, even though perfection is the goal. We can strive for perfection on any day, and in any given moment. Focus on the perfection of God as the ultimate goal. And when we inevitably have a bad game (day), focus not on the loss but on winning the next one.
