a Sermon for Epiphany 5A
Text: Matthew 5:13-20

Going up the mountain

Jesus begins walking up a mountain. He invites His disciples to join Him.

Finding Jesus up a mountain. We would be hard-pressed to avoid that image here of the holy man and a mountain-top experience. We’ve seen this in books and movies: people climbing a mountain to ask the holy man the secrets of life. The holy man, sitting cross-legged, imparts wisdom onto those who come seeking it.

In our scripture, we get an entirely different picture. Moses climbs a mountain alone, vision obscured by clouds, GOD giving not wisdom, but instruction. Even the Transfiguration of Jesus shows three disciples witnessing the supernatural change in Jesus, not all.

Here, the disciples follow Jesus, not to a peaceful peak of wisdom-gathering, but a mountain side of GOD-communing.

Jesus speaks to them—which in the text is hard to tell which “them” this is: the disciples or the crowd. Or both. Perhaps Monty Python’s Life of Brian captures this challenge best when those on the perimeter mistake Jesus’s words here as “Blessed are the Cheesemakers.”

Perhaps we consider not who Jesus spoke to, but those who came to hear Him speak – following Him to a dangerous place to hear His most famous sermon. A sermon which calls us to a more dangerous way of life.

Introducing the sermon

The Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes, the blessings, which describe the very diverse blessings that may be found in Christian community:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, and blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Perhaps we have trouble seeing these as blessings. We name our blessings as those who are happy, committed, strong, practical, rigid, political, violent: the strong, the stable, the powerful. Those who do the persecuting.

Before we can comprehend the beauty and power that Jesus is speaking to, He talks about saltiness, lights shining, and The Law and the prophets. He lays out a challenge to living a more disciplined and directed life. Something many of us aspire to. A life of hard work. Something our scouts can certainly relate to.

For many of us, though, the kind of life Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount can feel like a life that is impossible to live. A life of rigid expectation. A life of impossible obedience and inevitable failure. Something just too hard. Keep your saltiness, shine your light, keep all the commandments. Do, do, do! Be, be, be!

Or maybe it is a life that too often forces us to rely on weak or ill-equipped people. Like raising a tent with people who can’t match poles or building a fire with wet wood. How can Jesus expect us to work together when we feel as if so much more can get done if we do it ourselves?

A Flavorful life

When Jesus calls the people, the disciples, salt, He is calling them not only a preservative, but a flavor-enhancer. He calls them something born and naturally empowered to make food better. Salt that doesn’t make food and life better is useless. Therefore, a follower of Jesus that doesn’t make this world better than it is, is not following Jesus.

Then Jesus makes sure we don’t think we’re alone in this:

“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid.”

This is our work: bearing the light of Christ. Each, together. A light that is revealed in our many blessings, perhaps especially in those weaknesses—those places of weakness that draw out our anger and bitterness. Those parts of us and our community we call failings, mistakes, wrong are part of our blessedness—part of what makes the light shine brighter. Perhaps more important than all our successes.

This is the root of Jesus’s support for the Law—His Jewishness. His view of the rules, His view of GOD’s direction for the faithful. It isn’t an impossible truth Jesus is proclaiming or “try your best” but a way of living—a life that calls important how we live and who we are. Not restricted or excluded, but enlivened, better, blessed. Salty. Flavored. Rich in love.

The Law and love

Jesus loves The Law and came to fulfill it, not abolish it. But the love Jesus has for The Law is a love that isn’t rooted in following the rules or being dutiful for its own sake. It is not because He’s a Type A personality or got good grades in school or to please His parents or under threat of what would happen if He broke them or because He’s “just that way” or that the Son of God can do the impossible: He loves the Law because He loves GOD. And GOD promises that this world will be better when we follow this counter-cultural law. For Jesus, The Law is about love.

Jesus calls us to join Him on that mountainside. We are invited to go to where He is. Where the humble and the penitent are blessed. Where the light will shine not as a beacon or as a porch light attracts bugs, but as a flashlight that breaks the darkness and brings us back to camp. A light that makes our world visible to us and we to our world.

There is no way for us to have this light or see it, understand The Law or follow it, be salty and blessed or taste any flavor at all if we don’t know Jesus. If we don’t put the gospel at the center of our lives—our days, our gatherings, our prayers.

The crowd doesn’t follow Jesus up the mountain, His followers do. May we show that courage.