Who We Are
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Some of the most important words that Jesus spoke can be found in the famous “I am” statements that he shared with his followers. “I am the bread of life.” “I am the good shepherd.” “I am the true vine.” “I am the resurrection and the life.” These statements are central to the gospel, because unpacking these statements gives us a deeper understanding of the one whom John describes as “The Word.” But if understanding who Jesus is constitutes the most important pursuit of the life of discipleship, it’s possible that understanding who we are, or rather who we are called to be, is a close second.
So here in Matthew chapter 5, when we read a statement about our identity from the one whose opinion and perception of us matter more than anything else in the world, when the one whose words have the power not just to shape opinion but to shape the very fabric of the universe, the great I AM, says to us, “You are,” we need to take notice of what follows next. And what follows next is a parable, or at least a parabolic statement, about who we are, not just in the eyes of the people who long to define us according to their standards, but in the eyes of our God. You are the salt of the earth, Jesus says. You are the light of the world.
These phrases have made their way into our vernacular, so that, like all familiar ideas, they run the risk of losing meaning. When we talk of people as being salt of the earth, we mean that they’re a good sort of person, the kind of person you’d like to go fishing with. That might be true, but it’s a significantly diminished variation on Jesus’ theme here. When political leaders, from Roger Williams to Ronald Reagan, refer to America as a city on a hill, they’re tapping into the imagery, but not quite scratching the surface of what Jesus was getting at here in Matthew’s gospel.
These two metaphors of salt and light enjoy a kind of double life. We all know about the usefulness of salt and light in a variety of situations. These are common, abundant, and versatile components of the universe in which we live and move each day. In the 1920’s the Diamond Salt Crystal company published a pamphlet entitled “101 Uses For Diamond Crystal Salt.” These uses included “keeping the colors bright on boiled vegetables; removing rust; cleaning bamboo furniture; killing poison ivy; treating earaches.” In other words, a dizzying array of practical household applications of this element. And anyone who has ever stumbled through a darkened hallway or attempted to read in the fading twilight knows that light isn’t just useful; it’s necessary.
Jesus knew this as well. Having grown up in a village where the local fishermen would have relied on salt to preserve their catch, Jesus was familiar with the importance of this common, but crucial, compound. And I can picture Jesus and Joseph spending many late nights working in the family carpentry shop, cutting and planing wood by the light of a couple of candles, in order to finish a job on time. For Jesus and his audience, salt and light not only made life better; in some ways they made life possible.
But these mundane, everyday uses and applications of salt and light didn’t tell the whole story. In addition to its 101+ household uses, salt and light were both features of the religious imagination of Israel. As far back as the time in the wilderness, as God outlines the finer points of the covenant with his people, salt appears as an important ingredient of that covenant. According to Leviticus chapter 2, every animal sacrifice that the priests made before the Lord was to be seasoned with salt. Salt was also mixed in with the incense that burned in the tabernacle as an offering to God. From their earliest days as a people, the Israelites would swear covenants of salt with one another, using the element as a prop that spoke of endurance and faithfulness. Newborn babies were rubbed with salt as a sign that they were set apart for holiness. The function of salt as an agent of preservation and of purification gave it a symbolic significance.
And then there is light. It’s not too much of a stretch to think of light as a religious image. From the opening lines of Genesis, when God said “Let there be light,” to the opening lines of John’s gospel, when we read that “in Jesus was life and that life was the light of men,” light has always stood for truth, wisdom, the vitality that is in the universe. Within the history of the covenant, light, especially the light of candles and lamps, is a powerfully evocative image. In Exodus, we read that the lamps of the tabernacle were to be kept burning before the Lord from evening till morning, as an ordinance among the Israelites for generations to come. These burning lights were meant to bear witness, as an eternal flame, to the idea that God had chosen to dwell with this people. If light is meant to reveal something, then in the context of the Jewish covenant light is meant to reveal the nature of God and his steadfast love for his people.
So, for thousands of years, the religious imagination of the Jews, the religious imagination that would have shaped the perspective of Jesus’ hearers, pointed to salt and light, two of the most common things we can think of, as realities with sacred significance. They are common objects, familiar within the fabric of the universe, ubiquitous in the world in which we live, yet pointing to something beyond this world, to a God whose faithfulness and truthfulness can transform even the most ordinary object, the most ordinary people, the most ordinary life, into something holy.
When Jesus, in the context of his sermon on the mount, turns to his audience and says, “You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world,” he’s speaking in the language of a covenant thousands of years old. He’s revealing to these ordinary people their sacred identity. We are in the world. We are not of the world. But we exist for the world, for the sake of the world that God has created and the world that God loves. This is the world that God has chosen to save through his son. This is the world that God longs to restore to right relationship with him, and we are the people God has chosen to use to do it. We move through our days and nights, we exist in relationship with others, not as our own beings pursuing our own agenda, but as those who belong to God, as instruments to be used by him—as salt and light— for his purposes. Our mission is to live, as Alexander Schmemann writes, for the life of the world. Not so that the world might enjoy the life that it has always been living, that which it falsely calls life, but so that the world might enjoy the life that can only be found in God.
Salt and light were common elements, created by God and used by him in more ways than can be counted. We can’t ask to be anything more than that. Like salt, we exist for the preservation and purification of the world around us. Like that salt that was sprinkled on the bodies of a goat placed on the altar, we exist so that this world might be a more pleasing sacrifice to God. Like light, we exist to illuminate and to reveal the things of God. Like the lamps in the tabernacle, we are to be diligent, burning night and day in our witness. Although the world around us might hate those who believe, and might oppose our convictions, and might ridicule the ways in which we seem different, we still exist for the sake of that world, to model a better way, to be witnesses for the kingdom that can transform the broken and hollow ways of this world’s kingdoms into something beautiful, something worthwhile, something real.
You ARE the light of the world, Jesus says. You ARE the salt of the earth. Hear it. Believe it. Be it. Not just for your own sake, but for the sake of this world in which you live. God has created us and called us, to be willing implements in his hand as he sets about his work of restoring and reconciling all things in heaven and on earth to his purposes.
