Some things just won’t mix or at least shouldn’t: water and oil, light and dark, ammonia and bleach. One will rise above the other, cancel the other out, or react dangerously to anyone around. Throwing salt into a mix could either add flavor or kill off where it landed. Sometimes, Jesus brought things together that might not be a good idea.

Look at his famous sermon on a mountainside. Yeah, it’s a sermon even if it wasn’t in a “worship center” like a church or the synagogues with which he’d be more familiar. Mix it up. Take God out the door. Make the ordinary into more than you usually think.

Salt of the Earth

To say someone is salt of the earth is supposed to be a compliment, like here’s someone you can trust, depend on for doing the right thing. Interestingly, salt or sodium chloride, besides being a good add to your french fries, also is central to the production of many chemicals making it most effective with other elements in industrial processes.

On the other hand, salt can corrode metal, destroy vegetation, not to mention sting miserably if poured into an open wound.

So Jesus, what you saying here? Is being a salty soul a good thing or not?

Like most things, that might depend on how it is used. Know how there are fish who live in either fresh or salt water? Pay attention to your environment and what it does to you. But there’s more.

Light of the World

Oh God, look around here. Angels we ain’t. You know, most of us can’t afford to be professional god-doers like you and your crew. We’ve got to make it through each day and somehow eat, sleep, raise our kids and stay under the radar of anything that might take this away. Our taxes are all we can stand. Now, you’re telling us we’re like light, something like a fairy princess with magic dust so we can feel better about the life we’ve been dealt? That’s a true phony crutch if ever there was one.

He knows. He had just told them.  They grieve, they are oppressed, too much wrong has come into their lives to take away whatever good morsels they can make of it. They try to love their neighbors, be peacemakers, be good people. He called them “blessed.”

It doesn’t feel like it. That reward is too far off. Give me something that’s now.

That’s the point. He won’t separate it out. The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel is seen best from the darkest recesses at the opposite end. When the night sky is only shadow, the lights from a city on a mountain enlighten, reach out to those who walk toward it.

To be the light of the world, however, comes not from individual sources but is a call and reflection of the vision, purpose and hope needed to make it out of that dark tunnel. If it is covered up, its burn will dim to a flicker and smolder until it goes out. Jesus says keep it high on a lamp stand and give God gratitude for its being there.

Law Fulfillment

Now, he really mixes it up. He gives this line that he’s come to fulfill the Law.

Wonderful. Just hold that bar high and show us what we’re not. Don’t religious leaders do enough of that? Set impossible standards and then beat us up for it. 

Wait? What did you say? “But I warn you—unless you obey God better than the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees do, you can’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven at all!” Well, that won’t make you friends in high places, but what do you mean obey God better than the Pharisees?  They’re on our case about every step we take on Sabbath days. You want us to do more of that kind of thing?

Or are you trying to mix in law with light?   

You’re right. Wait. Start where it came from. Moses said, Love God with all your heart, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.   

When law is enforced but there’s no love, it’s as caustic as corroding salt, a slow chemical reaction that eats away and destroys the spirit. Law becomes an avenue of judgement creating a cover for light that is hidden, eventually smothered. In Jesus’ eyes, the Pharisees were promoters of religion gone wrong.

Jesus saw law as window into the heart of God, not an invention of righteousness but divine revelation. To do away with and abolish law is to declare God has changed—or worse.  Were God to do that, God also may not be trusted in any promises he gave either, as in those Blessings of which Jesus began this sermon. In short, to break a commandment is not just breaking an arbitrary rule but denies the essence of God in reordering the world.

To be the light of the world is to glow love. It’s not fairy dust. It’s connecting with God and others in that love. Law is not meant to control, but to raise up as oil sits on top of water. And it’s real, not hidden away, but known by salty good deeds motivated by love of God and neighbor.

Matthew 5:13-20