This reading of the Sermon on the Mount every other day, it's a time consuming commitment. I mean it takes 4 minutes, that's four minutes, to read Matthew chapter 5, and 3 minutes each for chapters 6 and 7. And that's not reading slowly. So around 10 minutes spent just reading the same thing I read two days ago. Ten minutes is nothing to the time I spend checking out Facebook, or checking and answering email, or listening to the News headlines several times a day.
Interestingly time has that mysterious quality of variable speed depending on whether we are bored or fascinated, depending on whether we think what we are doing is important or optional, productive or a waste of time. Thing is, if I read the Sermon on the Mount for a month, the three chapters every second day so 15 times, I'll spend two and a half hours reading this same text. I already know chunks of it by heart. It might be better to read three chapters of Matthew and get through the whole Gospel in an hour and a half hours
And that is where Jonathan Pennington's approach to the Sermon on the Mount reins in the impatience and obsession with efficiency that thinks of reading broadly and quantitively rather than deeply and qualitiatively. The ancient practice of Lectio Divina was a call to slowed down, repetitive, reflective, contemplative assimilation of a text until the text begins to form and give shape to what and how we think. It is a reading that takes to heart, a rumination both purposeful and nourishing, a repetitive reiteration of that which is significantly formative.
Go back to those early centuries, urges Pennington. The Sermon was not a problematic text too hard to achieve; rather it was a paradigmatic text "foundational to an understanding of Christianity itself." Those words of Jesus deeply sourced in the story of Israel and especially its wisdom tradition, were spoken into a new community that emerged within a Jewish and Greco-Roman matrix. And both cultural traditions posed and sought to answer the deep and enduring question of what makes for human flourishing, and answered in terms of the virtuous life. The Sermon is about the virtuous Christian life, what it looks like when it is embodied in the life of a community and in the heart and practices of the individual. The Sermon is about character formation, growth in the virtues of the Kingdom of God, foundation practices that are rooted and grounded in the person, the ministry and the Lordship of the one who "sat down….and opened his mouth to teach his disciples".
I remember the first time I came across the word "aretegenic", reading a book by Ellen Charry entitled, By the Renewing of Your Mind. Fortunately it was clearly explained in that book, because much of the point and argument depended on knowing what it means. Derived from the Greek word arete, it means "for the purpose of forming character or virtue". This is the word that Pennington wants to use as a description of the nature and purpose of the Sermon on the Mount; the Sermon is aretegenic, formative and transformative of character, by the development of virtuous dispositions and habits.
"Thus our reading of the Sermon, which is clearly focused on providing a vision for a way of being in the world, should naturally and rightly be focused on reading for the purpose of being trandsformed. All other readings, as beneficial as they can be – historical, literary, dogmatic, political, postcolonial, grammatical, linguistic, text critical – are at best steps toward the highest form of reading, reading for personal transformation." (15-16)
That kind of reading is obviously unconcerned about efficiency as such. The only productivity issue has to do with virtue, character growth, inner transformation towards formative practices of Christian behaviour and ethics. Pennington's focus does the Sermon the unusual courtesy of taking it seriously on its own terms. This is the teaching of Jesus, a person who is simultaneously the fulfillment and incarnation of both virtue leading to human flourishing, and of the Kingdom of God. "He is the complete and virtuous human and the true king." (15)
So a week into this reading discipline, into week 2 of a C25K training regime of reading and praying the Sermon on the Mount, I am being helpfully reminded of what the Sermon is for. Reading for reflection, and such reflection issuing in practice, and practice building towards habits of the heart and virtues of character, and all of this is an intentional commitment to formation of inner life and outward practice, towards the One who first sat down, opened his mouth and uttered these words to disciples.
That primary point established, there are two crucial words that Pennington takes a chapter each to explore. They are makarios and teleios. The received and common translations are "blessed" and "perfect" respectively – in the next two posts we will consider Pennington's careful reconsideration of both words, which happen to be hinge words in the Gospel of Matthew.
The painting is by David Hockney, The Sermon on the Mount.
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