Hilton Head Island, SC – June 5, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 5:17-20; Matthew 5:13-16
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid.” - Matthew 5:14
Almost certainly, the Sermon on the Mount was not spoken by Jesus as it was written in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus likely said this collection of saying over the entire three years of his ministry, but Matthew put them together as though he did it, as Shakespeare said, in one fell swoop. Probably he didn’t. Jesus likely said these things in many different places and to many different kinds of audiences.
I took the liberty of reversing our two scripture passages, because I want to focus on the first one second and the second first. In Mt. 5:17, Jesus says, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets: I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.” The term “the law and the prophets” meant the entire Hebrew Bible to the biblical Jews. He ended this short section by saying, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
The word “law” connoted four different things to the Jews. The first understanding of the word “law” referred to the Ten Commandments. Secondly, “law” meant the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Next it meant, as Jesus expressed it, “the law and the prophets,” or in other words, the whole Hebrew Bible. But finally it meant oral and scribal law, which is to say, the ever-growing commentaries on various laws in the Torah as interpreted by the scribes and rabbis in the Talmud, Mishnah, and other collections of rabbinic writings.
The Torah said that people shouldn’t work on the Sabbath. But what constituted work? Is it work to pull out a cow that was struck fast in mud on Shabbat? Marriage laws said who should marry whom. Was it okay to marry your brother’s wife’s sister, or was that incest? Property laws said who should pay whom for what. If your bull gored your neighbor’s sheep, what should you pay him in recompense? Thousands of those kinds of questions were addressed in the scribal law.
By the time Jesus came along in Jewish history, the oral and scribal laws had become extremely complicated. Jesus thought ordinary people could never adequately figure out what they should do in various situations because of how lengthy and circuitous the religious laws had become. If people wanted to fulfill God’s law, said Jesus, they simply needed to do whatever is righteous. The interpreted laws of the scribes and Pharisees couldn’t tell them that because they were so convoluted. Jesus implied that only the heads and hearts of people could do that.
Jesus said his followers should be more apt to do “good works” than other people. He also seemed to be saying that no one can loosen any of God’s laws. On the other hand, they shouldn’t make them so tight that no one could follow them, either. Jesus was definitely not opposed to what we call “organized religion,” but without question he opposed religion that became nothing more than a long list of Do’s and Don’t’s. Jesus was committed to the spirit of the law, but he resisted those who taught that the letter of the law, every niggling statute, was what counted.
Now let us turn to the verses preceding verses 17 through 20. At the conclusion of the Beatitudes, Jesus made a statement that has been repeated for the past two thousand years. “You are the salt of the earth,” he said. Whenever we say that phrase, we mean by it that anyone who is “the salt of the earth” is the kind of person who is admired, respected, and valued by everyone. They are people who are universally acclaimed to be what everyone should be.
But why did Jesus use the expression “the salt of the earth”? In the first century, salt was a precious commodity. For generations, Morton’s and other brands of salt have been widely and cheaply available to us, but that was not the case in Jesus’ day. For reasons we will probably never fully know, salt was hard to come by back then. Therefore Jesus was telling his disciples that they were to become especially valued and admired by everyone as the salt of the earth.
When we lived in Cleveland twenty years ago I read a story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that said there was a salt mine under Lake Erie right off the Cleveland shoreline. I can’t imagine why that would be so, but apparently salt had been extracted from that huge deposit for many years. Later I talked to someone who had been in the salt mine, and he said it went for miles under the lake. Whoever would have guessed it?
Salt is pure. There’s nothing in it but sodium chloride. In part because it is so pure, it is a good preservative for food. Without refrigeration, that would be especially important at the time Jesus lived.
Salt prevents chemical corruption. If food is well salted, it does not spoil. “But,” said Jesus, “if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot” (5:13). Probably water and time cause salt to lose its salty nature. Lake Erie has never leaked down into that Cleveland salt mine, so its purity has been maintained.
To speak of anyone as being “the salt of the earth” is a metaphor, of course. Jesus was metaphorically telling us that we are to be a major factor in bringing flavor and zest to the world. But how we do that? We must ask ourselves, are Christians the salt of the earth? Are we the light of the world? Are we lamps shining in the darkness?
Robert Louis Stevenson once made this entry in his diary: “I have been to church today, and am not depressed.” Is that a colossal advertisement for Christianity, or what? “I have been to church today, and am not depressed.” “I saw my boss in the hardware store, and he didn’t treat me like dirt, the way he usually does.” “I got a new cellphone, and it hasn’t driven me entirely crazy --- yet.”
Normally when we say someone is the salt of the earth, it means that person is just naturally an exemplary human being. But being the salt of the earth, either in the ordinary or in the Christian sense of that term, takes a great deal of effort, self-discipline, and self-control. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is telling us that is what he expects of us.
“You are the light of the world” (5:14). As we are to be the salt of the earth, so we are to be the light of the world. Considering a verse in the Gospel of John (John 9:5), that was an extraordinary thing for Jesus to say. In that passage, Jesus and the disciples saw a man whom they knew had been born blind. The disciples asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” That very question betrays a defective theology. Sin has nothing to do with anyone being born blind. It is rare for such a misfortune to happen, but when it does occur, no one’s sin has any bearing on it.
In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus dismisses the notion that sin was a factor in the man’s blindness, but rather in typical fashion, it says the man’s blindness occurred that “the works of God might be made manifest in him” (9:3). Then Jesus said, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (9:5). With that, Jesus brought sight to the blind man.
Which is it: Is Jesus the light of the world, or are we the light of the world? The two statements are not mutually exclusive. It isn’t either/or; rather it is both/and. Jesus is the light of the world, but we also are meant to be the light of the world. People saw God through Jesus, and if we are living as we should, they should be able to see God and Jesus through us as well.
In order to fix his statement permanently in the minds of his followers, after saying that they were the light of the world, Jesus said, “A city set on a hill cannot be hid.” The Bible is a very pictorial book. It paints picture after picture after picture, so that its message may take deep root in our minds.
The first time I went to Israel, our group stayed in the guest hotel of a kibbutz on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee. From there we visited the ancient and holy Israeli city of Zvat, which is close to Mt. Meron, the highest mountain in Israel. That evening, after dinner, we went to a beach down beside the lake. The Sea of Galilee is 650 feet below sea level, but peering up into the darkness, we nevertheless could see Zvat, twenty or thirty miles away, its many lights twinkling in the dark. This verse sprang instantly to mind when I saw it; a city set on a hill cannot be hid.
God sent Jesus into the world to transform the world. He was the light of the world to turn us also into the light of the world. Each generation of Christians are to become the means by whom others see Jesus, and in seeing him, they also see God.
In Sunday school in first or second grade, we sang a song I have never forgotten. “Jesus bids us shine with a clear, pure light/ Like a little candle, burning in the night/ In this world of darkness, we must shine/ You in your dark corner, and I in mine.” “Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all the house” (Matthew 5:15). When there was no electricity, but only small oil lamps in every home, a little lamp gave enough light for everyone to see in the dark.
In the Sixties, an Australian quartet of Christian folk singers who called themselves The Seekers wrote a song they made popular, and it has been sung by others ever since.
This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine,
This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine,
This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine,
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
Hide it under a bushel? NO! – I’m going to let it shine,
Hide it under a bushel? NO! – I’m going to let it shine.
Hide it under a bushel? NO! – I’m going to let it shine.
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
Songs like that are easy to remember because the lyrics are so simple and so simply repetitive. They may not be the greatest poetry ever written, but they do find really good crevices in which to stick in our undernourished brains.
“Let your light so shine before people, that they may see your good works, and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (5:16). Salt, Light, and Lamps: easily understood metaphors for a world that surely and sorely need them. Let your light shine.