Heaven on Earth - Salt and Light

A few weeks ago, we started off on a new series of talks on what is known as The Sermon on the Mount. You’ll find this sermon in 3 chapters in the biography of Jesus written by Matthew, the first of the four biographies or gospels of Jesus that you can find at the beginning of the New Testament. These chapters are a collection, really, of the things Jesus used to teach, over and over again as he travelled through the province of Galilee, and on to Jerusalem. So, while it is likely, as a lot of theologians and others have argued, that Jesus didn’t teach everything contained in these chapters all in one go, it seems pretty clear that he did teach this, and that his teaching was gripping enough for it to be remembered and retold until it was finally recorded in the form we have it today.

These chapters have become very familiar. They have entered our common vocabulary. They are used all over the place, not just in Sunday school or Christian youth groups and churches, but by newspaper reporters, novelists, film writers, even politicians.

A good case in point is the passage we’ll be looking at today, about salt and light. Let’s read it, in Matthew Chapter 5, verses 13 to 16:

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.

Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.

In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

 

How often have you heard the expression, “He or she’s the salt of the earth”? The Rolling Stones, as another example, wrote a song called “Salt of the Earth”, about what they call “hard working people, people of lowly birth, common foot soldiers” and so on. I found a printing company on the internet called “Salt of the Earth”, which offers specialist printing services to artists and photographers. I certainly don’t mean to imply anything about hard working people, because we have a good few of those here, or about printing companies. But it seems to me that Jesus meant rather different when he first used this metaphor.

Therefore I’d like to try to make this teaching a little strange again, to take off some of the cotton wool it’s been wrapped in over the years so that we can feel a little of its original sting.

The image Jesus uses invites us immediately into making analogies. Salt preserves and adds flavour, doesn’t it, it keeps food from rotting and makes it taste better. I think I have lost count of the ways that people have used to turn that into a picture to apply to our lives. Be salty by not using salty language on the football pitch that was one talk I heard once. Be preserving by refusing to gossip in the workplace was another.

And that analogy is entirely appropriate, in many ways. But, whatever particular analogy the speaker chose, it was inevitably followed by the warning that we need to take care that we remain salty, even if it’s hard and we might get into trouble with the boss and the temptation is great to compromise our good Christian ideals and so on. All of which, to my mind, seems designed to turn this into an act, an outward performance. And so we either spend our time feeling perpetually guilty – “Oh, my colleague used a swear word and I didn’t say anything” – or we turn into joyless, judgemental grumps, constantly on the look-out for opportunities to demonstrate our saltiness by telling other people off for what they do wrong.

When the thing that should jump out at us is the fact that this salt stuff doesn’t make sense. Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?” It’s a lovely image except, have you ever tried to make salt not-salty? Anyone? You could take a small amount of salt and dilute it in water or something until you can’t taste it anymore, but that doesn’t stop it from being salty. Salt, for as long as it is salt, by its very nature is salty. There is nothing you can do to stop that. All you can do is dilute it.

The point becomes clearer when we look at what Jesus says about light. A city on hill will be seen. Doesn’t really matter what anyone does to any of the lights, whether they burnish their lamps or just let them soot up and flicker. In the darkness, light will shine, for as long as it is light. A light under a bowl isn’t a light.

So why does Jesus bother to say something that is so blindingly obvious?

I have found, and so have many people I’ve spoken to, that we’ve tended to read that passage as if Jesus is saying, “You should be the salt of the earth”, that what he implies that it is up to us how salty we are and we should try harder. And then we spend all of our time trying to analyse what it is in particular that is stopping us from being salt, of being the agents of abrasive moral correction and preservation in the world that we ought to be.

But that isn’t what Jesus says. Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” It is a statement of who we are, not what we ought to be. What he asserts here is that something happens to us, under certain conditions, which can not be undone.

Let me give you an illustration. The first time I met Bob Mee was about two years ago at the Summer BBQ, which we’ve hold in Meanwood Park every year in July. I asked Bob, who’d just recently arrived at Wharfedale Vineyard, to help set out the food. My intention was that that was all he’d do, just set out some food and go. But then, when he turned up, it didn’t take two ticks before he was standing behind a table and serving people food. And he was great at it. He had a smile and a joke for everyone, and as I watched him I could see the way his friendliness changed the mood of people so much for the better. For the time he was there he made everyone who came to the bbq feel that they were being invited to a feast by a really kind and genial host, no matter who they were or where they were from.

When I went over and said, “You know you don’t have to do this, right?” he just laughed and he said something I’ll always remember – “Second nature just took over, Erik, and I just started serving.” And he was great at it. Now, the point is that I’m sure that Bob didn’t have to spend time to remind himself of what that verse was again in the Bible about salt and light, before he could decide what to do. The service he offered just poured out of him, I couldn’t stop him from doing it, even when I tried. And I know Jesus was smiling while Bob did that.

So, what is going on here? I think that in part what Jesus is saying in this metaphor is that, under certain circumstances, we become like salt in food, or like a light in the darkness – we become something so different from the world that surrounds us that we stand out, that we are obviously something new.

So how does that happen? How do we become different?

The answer is that this being salt and light has surprisingly little to do with us. It has a lot to do with Jesus. You may remember that at the beginning of this series, David spoke about the context in which Jesus talks. The key point I’d like to re-emphasise here is this. Jesus always began his teaching with the words, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” The Kingdom of God is short hand for something that his Jewish listeners would know immediately – it means the complete renewal and restoration of the whole world and of God’s people in it. And Jesus was claiming that that renewal, which everyone thought was still to come, was already going on around him.

Now, this passage of salt and light follows on directly from what is known as the beatitudes, which David spoke about. If you look in your Bibles you’ll see that, right? And in the beatitudes, Jesus describes what a human being looks like who has been transformed by God, who has become a citizen of the Kingdom of God. In this case, it doesn’t really matter whether Jesus actually ever preached these two things in this order, or whether it was Matthew who later chose to arrange it that way. The point is that Kingdom people, people who have become the citizens of God’s Kingdom, and who have therefore been transformed by God into the true human beings they were always intended to be, those people are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

How do we become these Kingdom people?

Jesus’ claim is as simple as it is radical – he says it over and over again throughout all the gospels. Give up everything you have, and follow him. That’s it. That is the sole entry requirement. Jesus promises that those who surrender to him become something completely new themselves, that they become as different to everyone else as salt is to food, as light is to darkness. In the moment that they surrender to him, an exchange takes place that is irrevocable – the present and past in them dies, and God’s future breaks in. The future has already happened to those who follow him, and they will never be the same again.

That claim Jesus makes would be utterly unbelievable, if he hadn’t backed it up by demonstrating its truth through letting the future Kingdom break out around him. Wherever Jesus goes, all the things that were meant to happen only in God’s perfect and future Kingdom begin to happen now – the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead are raised from the dead. These aren’t miracles, by the way. They are just signs of God putting things to rights, back into the order that they should always have been in. After all, you wouldn’t call it a miracle when you wash your dishes, would you?

And that breaking in of God’s future Kingdom doesn’t just happen wherever Jesus goes, but wherever those go who follow him as well. The future breaks into the present wherever they are too. And that has been going on for almost 2000 years. It is, in fact, inevitable that it will. That is what makes Jesus’ followers both salt and light, both the agents of preservation and correction in the world, and the agents of revelation and clarification.

The point is that we can’t become these Kingdom people under our own steam. Jesus actually goes out of his way to make clear to the religious people of his time that they can not become Kingdom citizens by their own efforts. We can never reach that standard of perfection on our own. But we can give up everything we have to him, and follow him. We can leave everything to Jesus, let go of our fond dreams of success and achievement as salt and light, of honour and fame, of career and possessions, and follow him. And when we do, the same exchange happens within us that happened in Jesus’ first followers – the present and the past are swept away, God’s perfect future breaks in. And we become a light for the world and the salt of the earth.

Therefore, the question isn’t whether we act salty enough, or have placed our light on a high enough stand. We already are salt, and we will continue to be salt. We can’t stop being so even if we try. The future has become present in us and it will not be rolled back. We may wish that it wasn’t so, but that is really a forlorn hope. Everyone around us will notice that we are different, even if they have no idea what it is that they do notice.

The question really is much more painful than that. The question is, how much of a citizen of God’s Kingdom am I, really? How much of myself have I surrendered to Jesus, how much of my present and my past have I given away to make space for God’s future? You see, while this surrender is a once-for-all deal, a pact signed once for all eternity, it is also and at the same time a continuous process of letting go, and of taking things back. We can compare this process to a child who has grabbed a whole bag full of sweets, but who surrenders them only reluctantly and one by one, even after he or she has agreed to give them back to daddy or mommy. And that letting go is much harder than we think.

During the National Leaders’ Conference, Simon Ponsonby, a vicar and theologian in the Anglican Church told the story of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the intellectual grandfather of the Nazi movement in Germany. Nietzsche grew up in a vicarage. His father was a devout Lutheran pastor. And that turned him off Christianity for life. Nietzsche once said of Christians, “You need to be more redeemed if I am to believe in your Redeemer.”

I don’t know about you, but that cut me deep. You have to be more redeemed if I am to believe in your redeemer. I was reminded immediately of my younger brother, who can’t stand the church and thinks Christianity is a lie. One reason for his hatred is me. In my determination as a young Christian to “be salt” I harried him and argued with him and condemned him and judged him. To tell you the truth, if anyone had done to me what I did to my brother, I wouldn’t be here today, either.

See, that is the other side of the coin, so to speak. Jesus says that those who follow him are salt and light. That means that it matters much more who we are than what we do. It is good to give a sandwich to someone who is hungry, but anyone can do that. It is good to give money to Oxfam, or to fly to Zambia to build houses and classrooms, but anyone can do that. The church has long since lost the monopoly on charity. The only way that we stand out, the only way that our giving is different from the charity of any number of other humane people, is if what we bring is not our action alone, but also the kingdom of our God in our hearts. The only way our care and compassion is different from the compassion of anyone else is if we bring with us the love and the compassion of the Creator for his creation, if we bring with us the power of the redemption and transformation earned for us by Jesus Christ.

We are only light and salt to the extent that we have surrendered to Jesus. Jesus can transform everything, he can take any kind of desperation and pain and guilt and change it into joy and peace. We can’t transform anything. Jesus can transform everything. But he won’t transform those things we keep to ourselves. The price he asks of us is that we give him everything, that we come to stand before him and say, “You are Lord of everything I am and have.”

To sum up – We are salt and light. From the moment that we give our lives to Jesus, and ask him to be our Lord, we become different, like salt is to food and like light is to darkness. Fortunately, we become salt and light through no effort of our own, but through our continual surrender of everything we are and hope and dream to the sovereignty of Jesus. From the moment that we surrender, the future becomes present in us, God’s perfect future that is yet to come already becomes a reality in us, and it pours through us, whether we will it or not, out into the world.

 

And so, may you come to know the joy of giving up to this Jesus, an ordinary carpenter form Nazareth and also the son of God. And once you do, may you too experience the breaking in of God’s future in you, and through you into your family, your workplace, and our city. May you too experience how he turns you into salt and light.