February 5, 2011
Isaiah 58: 7-10 + Psalm 112 + 1 Corinthians 2: 1-5 + Matthew 5: 13-16
In this age that glorifies the individual and always suggests and tempts us to think that everything is always about me, we are set up to miss something very important in these verses. The English language translation makes it all the more difficult because we have no distinction between singular and plural second person pronouns. In the original language there is no singular pronoun here.The word, “You” is used in the plural and it is used very emphatically.
Jesus is talking to his disciples as a group, not to any individual. He speaks to us today as a church aware of the fact that alone we can nothing that really matters, nothing that will endure. Together however, we can fulfill his mission, and so the commission of Jesus in these verses is a vision of what we must become and what we must do together. A single grain of salt is not going to do anything. It just as well be trampled under foot.
This gospel is first of all a challenge to our contemporary individualism. Salt is only good when it gets mixed up with other things. As long as we continue to think that religion is a private matter, that faith is just about me and Jesus, that the Gospel and the mission of the church is to be concerned only with internal pious matters and never address or question matters of society and social issues, we are never going to get the point, and never be a light in this world.
We are salt, says Jesus. Not for ourselves, but for the earth!We are light, not for a closed fellowship, but for the whole world!These verses anticipate the final commission that closes Matthew’s Gospel when he sends them into the whole world to make disciples of all nations.To do this, we must work together, we must be church.
The message gets even harder to grasp and internalize when an old English saying gets thrown into the mix. You’ve heard the description of “good-old-boys” described as being “salt of the earth” type people. This kind of thinking with this image waters it down so badly that there is hardly any hope of understanding what Jesus is proposing. So, when I do get around to writing that “Gospel of Norman” I talk about now and then, I’m going to adjust or correct the image, and it’s going to read: “You are the red-hot-chillie peppers of this world.”
In other words, this church and everyone in it ought to be spicing up life in this world. We are not sent to put people to sleep, bore them to death, alienate them, or condemn them. We are sent to spice up their lives, give them some joy, a reason to live, to laugh, to smile. This is why Jesus and his disciples so often got criticized for eating and drinking, for parties and celebrations. Remember those verses where Jesus responded to his critics complaining over his joyful life by saying who fasts while the bride-groom is present? Any church that adapts itself so completely to the secular world that it fails to be different, unique, and have something offer over and beyond making people feel good has lost its flavor.
It is the same with the image of Light. Ancient Israel assumed that God was not only the source of light for the world, but God was that light itself. As a church we cannot think for a minute that we are the light as one silly popular hymn suggests. It would be better to imagine that we are the window through which the light shines, for there is truly only one light.
What is set before us today in this text of Matthew’s Gospel is a formative description of what we must become and what we are called to be by Christ.
These verses today are part of that Great Sermon on the Mount we began last week. There were Beatitudes followed by a sudden shift from the third person: “Blessed are they…” to the second person Blessed are You” The verse immediately before today’s verses said: “Blessed are YOU when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely.
Discipleship is a relationship not just with Jesus, but with all the other disciples.In these early verses of Matthew’s Gospel the image and the mission of church is being formed. This is not an individual, private thing. It is a corporate, communal experience we become together, a relationship that shapes and forms us not the other way around. For this conversion of heart and life to be accomplished we must be willing to die to self and rise to new life in Christ.Let us pray today that because we have been together here with Christ a little spice for life will come into this world and into those around us this week; and may the Light of Christ shine through us where ever there is darkness.