Two Books

Two wonderful books crossed my path this past week. Both worth sharing (and giving me an excuse to get back to regular blogging).

In the field of religion/theology, I recommend "What Did Jesus Mean: Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables in Simple and Universal Human Concepts" by Anna Werzbicka, a linguistics professor in Australia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). I have just finished a six-week preaching series on the Sermon on the Mount (SotM) and this was by far the most helpful of the books I referenced while preparing. The SotM is a pretty unwieldy. It's a hodge-podge of various sayings that don't necessarily cohere thematically. It's assumed to be a creation of Matthew and not an actual "sermon" of the historical Jesus, but nevertheless, it has emerged from the New Testament canon as probably the single most influential set of teachings of Jesus. People read it as a single sermon, even if it never came from Jesus as such. So the question I wrestled with as a preacher is "how can this disparate group of sayings be treated in a way that they make sense as a single theological unit?"

Werzbicka's facility with language makes her surprisingly adept at navigating the SotM's peculiar turns-of-phrase. Let me give just one example: in Mt. 5:33, there's a really peculiar little saying about oaths where Jesus concludes by advising listeners to let their "yes" be a "yes" and their "no" be a "no." In a pattern repeated throughout the book, Werzbicka carefully looks at the grammar of the text (although, not a Greek scholar, she does not do her own original language translations), does an adept scan of the relevant literature on the passage comparing how a varied group of exegetes have interpreted Jesus, then walks through what she understands Jesus to have meant, line-by-line, employing a careful sense of the whole context of the gospels. They key aspect of Werzbicka's technique is the use of what she calls "universal human concepts." She renders 5:33-37 as:

a) if God says something about something God always says something true
b) people are not like this
c) when people say something to other people about something they don't always say something true
d) it will be good if when you say something to other people about something you always want to say something true
e) it will be good if other people can know this about you
f) it will be good if when you say something to other people about something other people can always know that you want to say something true (99).

Werzbicka's use of "simple" language might give the impression that she is absurdly reductionist in her analysis. I assure you she's not. After 4 or 5 pages of sophisticated work on a passage like the one above, reaching this simple paraphrase is a delight--I kept feeling like I was discovering things about the Sermon on the Mount that I never had the language to describe or put my finger on. Jesus' words and their profound moral clarity shine because of Werzbicka's treatment. I highly recommend this book if you are doing any kind of teaching or preaching on the SotM--or if you just want to know what Jesus really meant. I think she gets pretty darn close.

On a different note, I just finished Sarah Manguso's, "The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir" (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). Safe to say it's unlike any book I've ever read. Manguso's a respected poet, and this memoir about her struggle with a terrifying physical and subsequent psychological illness through the decade of her 20s is as much a chronicle of dream as fact. She treats her own illness with an almost bemused curiosity--that all these things happened to her body still seems plainly absurd to Manguso, years afterward. Manguso is so plain in her depiction of needles and catheter tubes and transfusions and nausea and other bodily processes that one can see modern medicine as both a profound miracle and something that makes a patient's humanity a casualty and leaves only a body on a bed to be manipulated by foreign hands. I've never read so vivid a description of what it feels like to be sick. While Manguso regularly gives you an inside view on what was happening to her body, her illness is every bit as much an affliction of the mind--she shows how illness creeps into identity, invading and colonizing spaces in the mind that were once reserved for other purposes.

Manguso's memoir is not a diary and it's more interesting for avoiding that form. It dances and lurches and heaves itself forward (and back) in micro-short chapters; each is an essay, a vignette, a scene stolen alternately from the battlefield of her body's war on itself or from her mind's sharp yet imperfect remembering of what it felt like to be sick. I feel like I have to note that I didn't end up liking Manguso at the end of the book--I'm clearly too eager to place suffering into a Christian theological container to be satisfied with the way Manguso plainly displays how her suffering brought out her pettiness and vanity. But that's also why the book is so damn good. It's too honest to trade in happy endings and easy moral lessons.