When I was a little boy, there was a party game that I really enjoyed. I forget its name, but it involved a group of children sitting in a large circle. One of them was designated as “it” and they had to whisper a message into the ear of their neighbour. It had to be a full sentence or a couple of phrases. The neighbour had to pass on what they heard (or thought that they had heard!) and so on round the circle. Then the final person had to say aloud what they had heard. It was always amazing to see how the message had been distorted – words mis-heard or forgotten or guessed at wrongly. The final result could be very amusing.
We know that Christians are meant to strive towards the perfection of Christ. One of the reasons we commemorate the apostles and great saints of the church is because they are exemplars of that holy perfection. However, if I am honest, it is very comforting to me to read hagiographies that describe not perfect angels but very human, very relatable people, who are just as fallible as you and I. Perhaps that is why I especially love those bits of scripture that show Jesus and the disciples being human in ways we can all relate to.
In the reading from Acts this week, Paul has one of those moments. A local slave girl, possessed by a spirit of divination, follows him and his companions around, yelling at them and about them. Presumably after several days, this gets under Paul’s skin, because the text describes him as being ‘very much annoyed.’ I can certainly imagine I would be too!
The key is that, when Paul gets annoyed, he is still focused on the cross of Christ. He is not perfect, in the understanding of perfection as the absence of human weakness. Instead, the perfection he is striving towards is that which allows him to speak and act to the glory of God, even in his weak moments. His frustration is directed towards the spirit, not the human it possesses. It leads to an exorcism that frees her, not a rebuke that chastises her.
I like this way of looking at perfection: not as some unattainable goal that keeps moving further away the more we run after it, but as something that instead moves towards us, colouring and shaping our humanity in all its fulness, transforming our intentions so that they work not for our own desires but for the realization of the Kingdom of God.
Mother Amanda