(A little longer than three minutes, but after all, it is the beginning of Lent, and perhaps we are allowing ourselves a little more time in cultivating holy habits?)

How do we begin Lent together? With a passage from the Sermon on the Mount. We hear Jesus’s teaching, addressed not just to the “in-crowd”, the disciples, but to the “out-crowd”, the curious people of Galilee, who have followed this teacher, preacher, miracle worker, wonder man, out into the countryside, away from the busyness and business of the lake side towns.

If we want to understand the Sermon on the Mount we have to realise that it is not a transcript of a single sermon preached on a single occasion by Jesus: rather it is a compilation of some of his teaching (and certainly not all of it: if you read it out loud it lasts no more the seven or eight minutes, and we can assume that Jesus had more than that to say in three years of Galilean ministry)— a compilation collected and arranged by Matthew and placed by him at the beginning of his account of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee. The Sermon on the Mount frames Jesus ministry and supplies what the scholars call a “hermeneutic lens”; that is, it gives us a means of realising the way in which all of Jesus’s teaching and actions should be interpreted.

Now, the Sermon on the Mount has caused problems for Christians in the past, if only because so much of it seems to be impossible for the average Christian to fulfil. I mean, we have to be realistic, and there is no point in struggling every year to apply the Sermon to our lives. We will be setting ourselves up for disappointment, and God for letting down. . The counsels of evangelical perfection, the Sermon on the Mount has been called (“evangelical” in this instance meaning “to do with the Gospel” and not “to do conservative American churchmen”). And, despite what Jesus says to the disciples a little earlier in the Sermon on the Mount (“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”), most of us now that realistically, this perfection won’t be achieved this side of heaven.

And there is more. There is a real weirdness which happens if we try to live a life of evangelical perfection. The weirdness is nicely satirised in a new book by the American writer A. J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically.

Jacobs describes the experiment which lead to the book thus:

The Year of Living Biblically is about my quest to live the ultimate biblical life. To follow every single rule in the Bible – as literally as possible. I obey the famous ones:

• The Ten Commandments
• Love thy neighbour
• Be fruitful and multiply

But also, the hundreds of oft-ignored ones.

• Do not wear clothes of mixed fibers.
• Do not shave your beard
• Stone adulterers

Jacobs’s background did nothing to prepare him for the experiment. He was raised a secular Jew, who both expected the withering of religion and was puzzled by its permanence. As the year went on he found that the experiment took on a life of its own. It made a demand on his morality:

I tried not to covet, gossip, or lie for a year. I’m a journalist in New York. This was not easy.

It became a spiritual journey:

As an agnostic, I’d never seriously explored such things as sacredness and revelation.

It became a critique of the bad religion in modern-day America:

I became the ultra-fundamentalist. I found that fundamentalists may claim to take the Bible literally, but they actually just pick and choose certain rules to follow. By taking fundamentalism extreme, I found that literalism is not the best way to interpret the Bible.

This is all very well, but what is possible as a personal satirical experiment for an American journalist, is not possible for a larger church community. If you want to see what a society living by unmediated and uninterpreted scriptural morality looks like, then just study Taliban Afghanistan.

Of course, thinking that the good religious life is just as matter of following rules is exactly what Jesus is preaching against in the Gospel for Ash Wednesday. Look at the hypocrites, he says, those who follow the rules but forget the reason for the rules: well, they have their reward. It is a problem still for Christianity, or at least a particular understanding of Christianity which tries to bargain with God: if we do enough, if we stay really busy, then you’ll count that as perfection, won’t you Lord?

Tom Merton had a word for such a bargain: violence.

… there is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by the multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence It destroys the fruitfulness of one’s work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.¹

This is violence: violence against God and violence against ourselves. And, as we are made in the image of God, violence against ourselves is, ultimately, violence against God as well.

There is another solution: one that lies beneath the whole of the Sermon on the Mount, beneath the whole of Jesus’s teachings and actions. If you want to live the Sermon on the Mount, recognise that we are made to please God, and pleasing God is not about obeying longer and longer and weirder and weirder lists of rules.

Merton, again, is the best twentieth century proponent of the Christian vocation to please God that I know of . It was captured beautifully in this prayer/meditation. This prayer will be mine in the forty days of Lent, so that I might learn to make it mine for the whole of my earthly life. I hope it serves you well too.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.²

1. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1966, p. 86 of the 1989 Image/Doubleday edition [↩]
2. Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, 1958 [↩]