URC Daily Devotion 22nd January 2019

I heard a sermon a few years ago that suggested a key: Matthew 5:47, which reads, “And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same?  So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (ESV).

That word ‘unusual’, sometimes translated ‘extraordinary’, is the Greek word perisson. It’s the same word Jesus uses in John 10:10 when he offered life in all its fullness. It has a sense of abundance, of surplus, of excessive extravagance about it. And it seems to have been viewed by Jesus as a crucial quality of the Christian life. Jesus expects, wants, yearns for us to go far beyond the norm, far beyond what might be expected as reasonable and ‘enough’. This is how Jesus expects us to go beyond the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. Anyone can follow rules, but to have a heart that overflows with a desire to bless and serve others is extraordinary.

It is the perisson that refuses to settle an eye for an eye, and pushes us into the uncharted territories of grace where cheeks are turned and shirts are pressed into oppressor’s hands. In the land of perisson, enemies are loved and persecutors prayed for. And the basis of all of this is the very nature of God: God is extraordinary; God is perissonic, to coin a term – and if we want to live in His kingdom we have to be exactly like Him.