Make the Sermon on the Mount your Lenten program

Jesus went up the mountain, sat down, and told us all about Lent. The Sermon on the Mount is a perfect preparation for Lent, because it’s a guide to real personal change.

Picture yourself at Jesus’ feet and listen.

On one side there’s a giant blue sky and a sweeping vista of the Holy Land; on the other, Jesus Christ, this remarkable, mesmerizing man is just as impressive as the view, because he is also the Son of God.

Looking at him, and at the view, you can easily imagine the kingdom of heaven he says the meek will inherit.

First, he says you will be Blessed with great things if you follow him — and then he says you will be a great blessing to the world, like salt or light. But then he explains that this doesn’t happen automatically. You have to commit to a program of personal change. A program like Lent.

What Jesus suggests is what psychologists say is our only real shot at change.

Research says people can change — but only by changing their “context.” Typically, this happens due to a major life event, like a loss or an illness or a move. But it is also possible to change your context interiorly by habitual practices.

In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt says moral thinkers have tended to think of our battle to do the right thing as our reason controlling our passions. If the passions were an elephant, our reason was its wise rider, directing it where to go.

But then he shows, through ingenious experiments, that that’s not how it works. In fact, the emotional part of our brain, the elephant, ends up basically doing what it wants — and the rider’s job is relegated to making up reasons to justify what it did. 

That means the only way to change your life is to change your elephant; to change your heart.

Jesus describes how you can train your elephant: by reforming your heart.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us to surpass the righteousness of the Pharisees, by moving beyond white knuckling our fidelity to a list of rules, and developing a new moral taste for the right things instead.

He tells us that the commandments say to stop hurting people — stop committing murder or adultery. “But I say to you,” something different, he says — don’t even think of others as fools or objects of pleasure.

Don’t just change how you act, change how you love: change yourself not from the outside in, but from the inside out. 

This is what fasting, prayer, and almsgiving are for.

Jesus says, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light.”  So fast from those things that darken your life — clickbait, social media, shopping sites, and too much entertainment.

Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” He will say “I never knew you” to those he turns away.  So return to Jesus’ side every day, to learn the Father’s will and truly know Jesus in personal prayer.

“Where your treasure is, there also will your heart be,” Jesus says, so take money and time from the things you need to value less, and give them to what you need to value more — works of mercy and service.

If Lent works the way it should, it will leave you on firmer ground this Easter.

“Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock,” Jesus says.

St. John Chrysostom explains what happens in the life of a Christian who follows the Sermon on the Mount and builds a house on rock:

So spend time at Jesus’ side, with your Bible open to Matthew chapters 5-7, and Lenten reform can re-form your heart.