Salt, bushel baskets, and the Law.
Epiphany 5A | Matthew 5:13-20
This is one of the weirdest gospel passages in the lectionary cycle. I’ve heard some pretty bad sermons about our saltiness.
But I think the first mistake we make this week is forgetting that this stems from the Beatitudes.
Back to the Beginning
The Beatitudes, remember, are a sequence of unlikely blessings which reorient our values toward compassion, generosity, and justice.
We talked about them last week. And the lectionary pairs that reading with one from Micah. A reading which mines the same territory. And that reading culminates in:
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
—Micah 6:8
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?”
And while we love this idea abstractly, we struggle to incarnate it with our lives.
Doing Justice
Doing justice, is not merely hungering and thirsting for it. But it is making it known in our world. We are to make Shalom: peace, justice, wholeness.
So it is not sufficient to long for an end to racism but act toward its end. We use thoughts and prayers. And we write legislation. And retrain officers, change funding priorities, and reshape our communities.
Loving Kindness
Loving kindness (in this translation) — also often translated as loving mercy — goes well beyond being nice to people. It’s wanting more for them.
Psychologists have studied what social comparison does to our decision-making. In essence, how we see ourselves in relationship to those around us. Which is at the heart of what Jesus is getting at in the Beatitudes.
In one study, they gave subjects two options:
Take a $50K raise while your peers get a $25K raise.
Or
Get a $100K raise while your peers get a $250K raise.
Which would you pick? Think about it for a second.
And 56% of people choose option one. They would rather receive less money to ensure others get even less than they do. By a big majority. To avoid being that generous, they would take less.
Or, to read it another way, to deprive the whole community from thriving, most people would seek supremacy within a less healthy community.
This, we recall, is how masters of industry impoverished the working class and destroyed the solidarity between races more than a century ago. They offered whites living in poverty the chance to have less terrible circumstance than blacks living in poverty over everyone living a better life.
Walking Humbly
We have a strange view of humility. Much like niceness, our vision of humble walking means something like, being as rich as humanly possible, just not flaunting it. Or thinking we’re amazing, just not saying it out loud.
But if we’re following along, it is hard to square these depictions of humble with the boldness of Shalom-making.
But our WASPiness—our White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethos—loves projecting economic humility. Just not class humility. Education, place in society, the benefits of the cars we drive, the universities we attended, and the experiences we’ve afforded ourselves; these make us special.
Let’s consider a different view of humble walking with God.
What if humble is about the integrity of our relationship to God and to each other. So when we see someone in pain, we want to make things better for them. It isn’t only about what we think about their situation. We actually recognize ourselves as part of the world that they live in.
When experiencing poverty of spirit, mourning, and challenge leads us to hungering and thirsting for righteousness, we are better prepared to walk humbly with the one who loves.
This is our saltiness.
The light we are not supposed to hide.
Engaging, being with people in their suffering. Knowing that our purpose is to live the Kin-dom of God. Which is the great realization of Shalom.
It is peace and love. And it is justice and equity. And health and wholeness.
So it means everyone is fed. Everyone is cared for.
And it also means we don’t ignore these needs. Personally—with the people around us. But, more importantly, systemically.
The Critique
This is the substance of Jesus’s critique of the Pharisees and Scribes throughout Matthew. He doesn’t condemn them for their Jewishness. He is Jewish. Nor does he condemn the sect we know as the Pharisees. Many believe Jesus was a Pharisee.
What Jesus names are the leaders of their religious system. And he names the injustice they tolerate. The lack of Micah humbleness when it comes to protecting the poor and making Shalom.
Our obsession with being nice is no more likely to make the Kin-dom in our time than the Temple leaders buddying up to Rome made the Kin-dom in Jesus’s time.
Jesus shows us the way to walk humbly with our God. And it looks as much like justice as it does humility.
The Challenge
This is why we struggle to really dig into this passage about salt, light, and the Law. Because we usually don’t have the Beatitudes in mind, but we have our culture’s vision of humility instead.
And this can really color how we see this.
Jesus is describing how to make the Kin-dom real in our world. And then he describes the pitfalls. Losing grace, hiding love, killing the Law by trying to preserve it.
And we might fixate on the negative, evaluate one another against these negatives, or misunderstand the purpose of the work itself!
So our fear of losing our saltiness may lead us to season nothing of this world. Such as worrying more about the state of our stained glass (or the names of their donors) than the messages they show.
Jesus doesn’t want us so tripped up in maintenance that we avoid the gospel.
Fulfilling the Law
This is why Jesus must be so direct in saying it.
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the prophets”
Because it is fair to assume that is precisely what they think!
He is freaking them out. And if we aren’t at least a little freaked out, too, then I’m worried we aren’t taking this very seriously.
Because Jesus is challenging us to meekly confront injustice, generously seek the face of God in everyone, and make Shalom in spite of facing persecution. That’s the light we bring.
And our brains measure this as paradoxical. Because humility in our culture means not rocking the boat. Even when the boat itself is unjust.
But just as Jesus embodies the Law and fulfills it, we embody and fulfill it when our humble walk matches Jesus’s. When we are blessed for our poor spirits and mourning souls; when we show mercy and offer our hearts generously.
When we bless the world with God’s blessing.
That’s where our light comes from. The light we share.
A light that may be the only one in the room. Bright enough to see by. Read by. Casting out to everyone. A generous, infectious joy. That all those around it might come closer. To be irradiated by. Enlightened. Restored.
A flame which might light so many eager wicks. Each a new light to shine, ever brightly. For ourselves, of course. But also, for others. So many others.