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Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.—Matthew 5:48

This is one of those verses in Scripture we tend to ignore. Surely Jesus is asking the impossible. But would Jesus do that?

This verse comes after Jesus compares the command to “love your neighbor and hate your enemy” with his saying, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). This is how we show ourselves children of our Father in heaven.

And this is how we are to be perfect (“teleios” in Greek). Here that word can be translated “undivided.” Just as God’s love is not divided between neighbors and enemies, between the righteous and unrighteous, so our love is to be undivided. Children are to be like their parent.

Teleios can also mean complete or mature. Here it refers to God’s complete, mature love that does not distinguish between neighbor and enemy.

While this may seem impossible (or at least really difficult) to us, Jesus calls us to love that way. And fiction writers try to do something similar when they create characters.

In his book How Ficiton Works (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), book critic James Wood writes, “There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character.” We’ve read books with characters who are ciphers, who stand for ideas rather than live from the page. We respond to characters that seem real, that are unique, or exceptional. Wood writes: “The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism.”

Creating characters that are unique, that live, is a form of love. I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s joke about the guy who said, “I love humanity; it’s people I can’t stand.” Jesus calls us not to love ideas but people, even those who persecute us.

An example of writing that reflects such love is Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). It is that rare book (Gilead, her previous novel, is another) that treats religion and believers with neither condescension nor acclaim. The writer is knowledgeable about religious belief yet gives no hint of attempting to influence readers’ beliefs. Instead she presents each character as fully human, with flaws, good intentions and actions, anxieties and aspirations. And we come to care for each of them nearly as much as the writer does.

Home centers around Robert Boughton, a retired Presbyterian minister, but it is told mostly through the eyes of Glory, Robert’s youngest daughter, who cares for her father at their home as he is dying. The novel’s tension arises from the visit of Jack, Robert’s wayward son and Glory’s older brother. Jack is the prodigal son who returns home after 20 years.

Most of the novel is talk between and among Glory, Jack and their father, with an occasional appearance by John Ames, who, we learned in Gilead, baptized Jack as an infant. Yet Robinson’s mastery of voice and character keep us engaged and rapt by their struggles with belief and hope, their relationships with one another. The prose forces us to slow our reading, then holds us to the extent that we are disappointed that it ends.

The care with which Robinson has created these characters is the care required to love those around us—both those we like and those we don’t. Yet she doesn’t set out to teach us that lesson; she simply creates good art.

In his book A Stay Against Confusion (Harper Collins, 2001), Ron Hansen quotes Flannery O’Connor, who warns against trying to make art (in her case, fiction) utilitarian. She writes: “What is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art.”

Good fiction reflects God’s perfect love.