Imperfect people do great deeds

“I don’t confuse greatness with perfection . . . all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection.”

I am a fantasy and science fiction fan in my reading-for-relaxation. I love going to other worlds that imagine other realities. Today–for Monday is my day off–I read the following quote:

“‘Are you saying that no matter how screwed up I was, you’d still expect me to work wonders?’ Appalling.

She considered this, ‘Yes,’ she said serenely. ‘In fact, since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.'”

We all know great people. Either we have learned about them in Bible class, or history class, or have actually met some great people. I do not mean people who were simply nice, or people who fulfilled their responsibilities, or people to whom we are emotionally attached regardless of how they are regarded. No, I mean those true great ones whose story is one we would like to emulate. No, not every bit of their story, but at least those parts of their story in which they made the right decisions and took the right actions to accomplish their great deeds.

But, in considering the life of great people, we run the danger of making them larger than life. We tend to, subconsciously, begin to lionize their lives so that we make them not only great people, but also perfect people. Somehow, we have come to associate greatness with perfection. We also tend to believe the converse. If a person is not perfect, they could not be great. Yet, that is a complete contradiction of our Christian belief. Greatness is not necessarily related to perfection.

One needs only to think of King David to see how greatness and perfection need not be related. He was both God’s man, a great man, and a quite imperfect person, which I say as an understatement. And then there is St. Peter, a man whose foot regularly found his mouth, who was on the wrong side of issues at least twice. He is the first name in every list of Apostles in the New Testament. We Orthodox do not agree on the Primacy of Peter, in the way in which the Roman Church understands it, but we do agree that there is a Primacy of honor in the New Testament record, which is why he is always named first. Yes, greatness is not related to perfection.

However, it is because we have related greatness to perfection that authors, producers, newspaper writers, etc., can anger us so much when they write an article pointing out all the imperfections of a George Washington or an Abraham Lincoln, etc. They count on our mental association between greatness and perfection in order to shock us when they show the imperfections in our great people. They use that shock to raise curiosity so that more people will buy their book, see their movie, read their article, and, therefore, earn them more money.

Yet, of all people, we Christians ought to be the first to NOT be shocked when it is shown that a great person’s life is filled with imperfections. Our great claim is that a bunch of very imperfect people, loved by the Father, redeemed by the Son, and empowered by the Holy Spirit have been given the job to take the Gospel to the whole world both in word and in deed. More than that, we claim that the Church has a history of saints and martyrs whose imperfect lives yet reflect, as in a mystery, God’s image and likeness, and, yes, even his perfection, into a needy world.

In fact, we are in the position of that very startled character in the book, when he says, “Are you saying that no matter how screwed up I was, you’d still expect me to work wonders?” We have a God, who in the mysteries of his will, has chosen to use “screwed up” people “to work wonders.”

Or, as St. Paul puts it, “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.”