‘You
are the salt of the earth … You are the light of the world’.
So says Jesus to his disciples in the
first part of today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel (5:13-20). It comes after
the Beatitudes at the start of the long discourse we call the ‘Sermon on the
Mount’. He is surely also speaking to us as his followers today. We too are the
salt of the earth and the light of the world! At least we are when we do our
best to be what God wants us to be, and when we fail, we are offered
forgiveness.
Salt gives savour to our food, and
preserves it from going bad. If it loses its taste, if it becomes contaminated,
it is useless and must be thrown out. Just like salt, says Jesus, if we are to
be good for anything in God’s creation, we must be the good people God has
created us to be.
Without light we can’t see what we are
doing, nor where we are going, and a lamp which is hidden away is useless.
Jesus tells us we must ‘let (our) light
shine before others, so that they may see (our) good works and give glory to
(our) Father in heaven’.
But what must we do, how must we behave, to be the
salt of the earth and the light of the world?
In the second part of the reading, Jesus abruptly changes
the subject to talk about Hebrew scripture.
He says, ‘I have
come not to abolish but to fulfil (the law and the prophets)’, fixing
himself firmly within the ancient traditions of the Jewish people into which he
was born. The ‘law and the prophets’ are the major part of the Hebrew
scriptures, which we call the Old Testament.
‘Not one letter, not one stroke of a
letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished’, he says. ‘Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these
commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the
kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great
in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds
that of the scribes and Pharisees’ – who for all their
faults did their best to be righteous, to obey every last letter of the law – ‘you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’.
Does this mean that Jesus teaches us as his disciples
that to enter the kingdom of heaven, we must follow precisely every last letter
of the Jewish law? Must we follow not just the Ten Commandments but also the smallest
rules about purity, such as not eating shellfish or mixing fibres in our
clothes? If this were true, we should seriously consider converting to Judaism!
To see what Jesus really means, we need to read the rest of Matthew Chapter 5.
Sometimes I get frustrated that the good compilers of
the lectionary miss out the context of what is set to be read. In this case the
passage about the law and the prophets does not follow on from the passage
about salt and light, but should be read as an introduction to the verses that
follow it.
In these following verses Jesus talks about his
interpretation of the law, giving several examples that do not abolish or replace but extend
the conventional interpretation of the scribes and Pharisees. You can read what
he has to say in Matthew Chapter 5 when you get home, but here are a couple of
examples:
·
‘You have heard
that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder”.’ – that’s one of the 10 commandments – ‘But
I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable
to judgement’. Jesus extends the commandment against murder to
falling out with another person. ‘If you
remember that your brother or sister has something against you … be reconciled
to your brother or sister’.
·
‘You have heard
that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery”.’ - another of the 10 commandments - ‘But
I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed
adultery with her in his heart’. And we should understand that
the same applies to a woman looking with lust at a man.
Notice what Jesus is
doing here – he is going beyond the precise wording of the commandments to
reveal the spirit of God’s law.
He also teaches us that there are circumstances when it is right to
break one commandment in order to keep a more important one. Elsewhere (Matthew
32:37-39) Jesus summarises the law and the prophets, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first
commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as
yourself”’. Jesus heals the sick on the Sabbath because it is
more important to love your neighbour than to observe the prohibition of work
on the Sabbath.
Jesus’s approach to God’s law is nuanced – he is more concerned with
what is right and just than in following rules like a robot.
The prophet Isaiah’s approach was the same, as Jesus
would have known very well. In today’s 1st reading (Isaiah 58:1-9a),
the prophet chastises the leaders of Israel for mindlessly following the laws
about fasting while oppressing the people. God wants a different kind of
fasting, he says:
‘Is not this the fast that I choose: to
loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the
oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the
hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to
cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?’
Following Jesus’s example, our task is surely to look
beyond the words written in the Bible to discern the spirit of God’s law and to
be guided by that.
This is a harder task than following the letter of
God’s word, as we read it in the Bible, which heaven knows the scribes and
Pharisees found difficult enough. It will require humility, open minds, and real
engagement both with scripture and with other Christians, some of whom see
things differently and cling to ancient tradition much as the scribes and
Pharisees did.
But this is what we must do, this is how we must
behave, if we are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, as
Jesus tells us we are.
The Holy Spirit will help us. St Paul in today’s 2nd
reading (1 Corinthians 2:1-12) says to the Corinthians, ‘we have received … the Spirit that is from God, so that
we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God’. In this way,
growing in maturity as Christians, we will be able to ‘speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed
before the ages for our glory’.
And in St John’s Gospel Jesus himself promises that ‘The Spirit of truth will guide (us) into all truth’
(John 16:13).
I finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word:
Faithful
God,
You have
appointed us, your witnesses,
to be a
light that shines in the world:
let us
not hide the bright hope you have given us,
but tell
everyone of your love,
revealed
in Jesus Christ the Lord,
who lives
and reigns with you
in the
unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God,
for ever and ever. Amen
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