When I left school my first permanent job was working at the
Bank of New Zealand on Queen street. For three years I worked in the customer
service department, doing various things. After three years I left. I handed in
my resignation at the beginning of December. At the departments Christmas party,
they were handing out joke gifts to people who had done good or bad things
during the year, and I got called up to receive a gift because I was leaving. The
woman from new accounts, who was giving out the gifts, presented me with a
little child’s plug in night light. You plugged it into the socket and it gave
off this reassuring glow. I don’t think she was a Christian but she said…they
were giving me this gift because…”we know Howard that you will be a light where
ever you go”…wow… I think I actually blushed… and not Just because it was
accompanied by a big sloppy kiss on the cheek…
I hope and pray that it had been the case, that people
glimpsed amidst my flaws and foibles that Kingdom of heaven love and care and
grace, that light and salt. Anyway, thirty-five years later it makes a great
introduction to Jesus talking to his disciples and saying You are salt… you are
light… yes you… you…wherever you go. Which is the passage in Jesus sermon on
the mount in Matthew’s gospel that we are looking at today. ‘You are’, says
Jesus, ‘the salt of the earth and the light of the world’… you… yes you!’
And that ‘You-yes You’ is a good translation of the second
person plural pronoun used in the Greek by Matthew, it’s as emphatic and
intense as if we’d all been handed a little night light. It’s what as I re-read
this passage for this message really stuck out to me and was most challenging,
You yes You are light and salt. Matt Woodly says we shouldn’t be surprised by
this as “that’s the essence of the Kingdom of God: everything gets turned
upside down, which is really right side up… little people, ordinary, flawed,
even weak and preposterous people, become the beautiful, God-appointed heralds
of a brand new world… and apparently Jesus could say this with a straight face
because the disciples, despite their faults and limitations, were bound to Him.”
It is the and Low I am with you to the end of the age that makes it a possibility
for us.
For the past month we’ve been looking at the beatitudes (the blessed problem) ,
Jesus great welcome into the Kingdom of God, and the nature of the blessed life
in his kingdom. Now with these two amazing metaphors from everyday life Jesus
focuses on his disciples and tells them how they will impact the world with
this kingdom life they possess. This admission of spiritual poverty, this
hunger and thirst for righteousness, this meekness, this showing mercy, being a
peacemaker even when they suffer for it, will change the world…
So let’s unpack what Jesus meant by salt and Light…
Firstly, Salt, and while we are talking of salt I’m going to
pass around a couple of bags of salt, and Invite you to just to pour some of it
into your hand, maybe taste it, or smell it, just to help you think about it.
Of course the big question is what did Jesus mean by salt.
What of its many uses is the one that will help us understand what Jesus was
telling us.
The obvious use that we have today is taste and flavour.
When I cook at home, I’ll often get Kris or Beth to have a taste just to let me
know what is missing, often what is missing is enough salt… People often see
Jesus talking of bringing flavour to the world. If that is the case that
flavour is Jesus flavour. It is the characteristic in the beatitudes and as we
see in the rest of the sermon on the mount, sacrificial love, even of enemies …
integrity…generosity… care for the least and lost.
Until recently a big use for salt was preservation. Before
refrigeration, people used salt to preserve meat. Are we called to be
preservative to keep the world from going off. You often see that reflected in
Christians bemoaning how the worlds standards have changed and our need to
defend good Christian values. While there is a need to stand up and be counted
on issues. It leads to seeing the use of political means and even force to
achieve those ends… where as in the end Jesus way of salting the earth seems to
be through people who meet Jesus having transformed lives and that permeating
into the rest of society.
I often wondered about this mystical solution that doctors
would use on wounds to clean it out and ward off infection, something called
saline solution, I think Kris pointed it out to me that saline meant salt, and
this miracle substance was salt water. Boy Did I feel dumb… In our modern
society we use salt as a purifying agent. Charles Quarles, says that salt in
the Old Testament is used in a ceremonial way to purify things. It was put on
to an offering to both make it holy but also a reminder of God faithfulness to
his covenant with Israel. In fact legal binding agreements were sealed by
eating salt or bread with salt on it. It symbolised the purity and faithfulness
of parties entering into that agreement. Quarles says that this best fits Jesus
use of salt as a metaphor, that as we reflect the very characteristics of God
in our Kingdom of heaven living, then it can transform and change the people
and societies we come into contact with, it purifies them as people respond to Jesus.
I was speaking to a
friend about preaching through the sermon on the mount, and her response was a
“humph, it’s all so negative”, they were doing it at her church at the moment,
and she was saying that it was an
exploration of Christian morality, pornography is bad, don’t look with lust,
divorce is bad… Don’t get me wrong I think those are issues we need to address
and deal with, But I wondered if that was that preservation mentality, a sort
of pharisee-ism, we are right you are wrong… whereas the purifying saltiness looks
at the sermon on the mount and sees the kingdom of God virtues of not treating
people as objects, having a genuine love for others, fidelity and integrity in
relationships, faithfulness, that is the saltiness.
Other scholars, simply say that these different uses of salt
while helping us to reflect on what Jesus are saying, need to be part of seeing
the overall picture of the importance of salt itself. As Matt Woodly puts it
Jesus is saying that we are salt, and salt is both good and different. It has
unique properties that make it good and essential for life, and things that
make it different. It is as we live that good and different kingdom centred
life that we do what Jesus is calling us to do, that we are effective and
useful and essential to the world. But when if lose that goodness, that
difference, that saltiness well as Jesus says it is not good anymore and so
should be thrown away.
Jesus asks… Can salt loose its saltiness? Salt blocks were
used to insulate the ovens of Arab bakers, after a period of time, and heating
and reheating a chemical reaction would happen that would change the properties
of that salt, and it would not be useful anymore, what made it good had
changed, so they would have to throw it out. In Israel most salt was sourced by
evaporation form the dead sea, and some times it would be mixed with other
minerals like gypsum which looked similar but did not have the same properties.
So it was useless for cooking or preserving or anything else really. Only good
to be thrown out on the street, which was the usual way of dealing with organic
trash, or was used to stop weeds growing on pathways because it killed off all
the weeds. It is a challenge to us, about living lives with a mixed and divided
focus, that stops us having that goodness and difference that makes us salty and
to do what it is supposed to.
You are the light of the world, again I’m going to hand out
a basket of small candles, and I just invite you to hold it in your hand just
to reflect and think on, as we explore this metaphor… I hadn’t thought what
you’d do with the salt, maybe it’s a metaphor for the fact that being salt and
light is a real hand full, and only able
to be a reality because Christ is with us and within by the Holy Spirit.
But I think we really do understand light as a metaphor more
than salt.
Jesus himself used the metaphor to talk of himself in John’s
Gospel… Jesus is the light of the world. The main use for light is to push away
the darkness. Maybe we get a good understanding of what it means that both
Jesus and we are the light of the world, when we look up at the night sky. For
our world the sun our star is the source of light, at night the lesser light,
is the moon, it is not producing light in and of itself it is reflecting the
light of the sun shining on it to us. As we are filled with Jesus the Light of
the world, we reflect that light to the world around us.
Jesus uses two metaphors to further illustrate what he means. The first
is a city on a hill cannot be hidden. He may be speaking of Jerusalem, or in Galilee
apparently the city of Tiberius was very visible at night. I always think of
driving hope from Wairoa to Napier, going through the winding dark rural road,
occasional being able to look down the coast and there would b a glow in the
distance and then as you come down and along the sea just before Bayview there
was Napier hill lit up and welcoming. And you knew you were home. Maybe we
catch something of that city trying to be hid when you think of the blackouts
in London and other cities during the second world war, and the great relief and
display of lights again when it ended.
The second is of a lamp. In Jewish days that was a small oil
lamp with a wick, and in most Jewish homes of the time they would put them on a
lampstand so they could provide illumination for the whole house. It would
silly to put that under a basket to hide the light.
Both say the purpose of light is to shine... Jesus is saying that the transformed kingdom light is to be
lived in such a way that people will see our good deeds, that they will shine
forth, and will give glory to our father in heaven. Again it’s good to remember
its not so we earn God’s favour, but it is the reflection of the light we have
received in our lives in Jesus Christ, reflecting out in kindness, sacrificial
love, integrity and dependability, generosity, love for one another and for the
least and the lost. It shines in love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and
self-control… the fruit of the Spirit, the light of God, at work within
us.
That light says Jesus is to shine in the good deeds we do.,
so that people will give glory to our heavenly Father. In that wonderful
summary of the first church in Jerusalem after Pentecost in Acts 2, we catch a
glimpse of that, there devotional life, their communal life, their generosity
and care, being agents of God healing and transformation resulted in them
having the favour of the whole city, and people gave glory to God because of
what was happening. They were the salt in the land, calling the Jews back to
being God’s people, they were the light for the nations, that was the start of
the church and its spread throughout the world.
We need to allow our light to shine like that. I love
When I left the BNZ they gave me a gift, a simple night
light and told me Howard we know you’ll be a light where ever you go.” Jesus
does the same thing to all of us, saying because you know me and my grace and
love… you’ll be salt and light where ever you go. Today I’ve given you both
salt and light and I want to finish by saying…” I know you… yes you will be
salt and light where ever you go.”
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