Messiah’s Perfect Righteousness

If you do your twenty assigned jobs, you are perfect. If you do a thousand assigned jobs, you are also perfect, but you have greater perfection. If you do your twenty easy tasks, you are perfect. If you do twenty difficult ones, you have achieved greater perfection. What you do perfectly that helps many is greater than what affects a few.

Our Lord achieved the greatest goodness, the greatest perfection, because he did the greatest act: laying down his life for all others. It was greatest because of its greatest difficulty (pain, suffering, rejection, death), its greatest effect (laying a foundation for reconciling people to God), and because of the greatest number of people it could benefit (everyone, everywhere, “everywhen”).

Even if we could find another mortal who had lived a perfect life, that person would not measure up to the righteousness of our savior. Jesus attained the greatest moral perfection in the human realm. He capped off his lifelong, everyday perfection by his final, most perfect expression of perfection—the highest goodness, the greatest love.

The cup and loaf reference that consummating perfection. In sharing them, we honor his righteousness for us, and we pledge that same devotion to the Father.

Virgil Wasrren christir.org