The wisdom to be found in all scriptures warns against the crime of hardening our heart, a perverse and self-destructive choice that derives from greed or power. Instead, universal wisdom tells us to lend freely and to forgive debts (Deut 15); to be generous to those whose hard labour made us prosper (like warehouse workers in the Amazon empire) and never to forget the widow and orphan. The core teaching we associate with Jesus – to love your neighbour as yourself – first appears in Leviticus, a dry book of religious rules. They may make us smile or cringe today, but their goal was the sanctification of all human life, personal and social. Today, most of us best understand this aspiration to holiness as our inherent longing to become fully human. “The One who called you is holy; like Him be holy in in all your behaviour for Scripture says, “Be holy, for I am holy” (1 Pet 1ff). Jesus’s reference to this human aspiration is clear but distorted in the usual translation using the word “perfect”. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Perfection seems an abstraction but the original Greek word teleioi, really means “brought to completion, fully developed, fully realised, thorough, whole”. That is, all the things we meditate to become, in order to become who we are.
Aspiration to holiness
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