Matthew 5:13-20 considers discipleship and the relation of discipleship to the Old Testament.
Matthew 5:13-20 considers discipleship and the relation of discipleship to the Old Testament.
In verses 13-16 (verse 13, see Mark 9:49-50, Luke 14:34-35), when Jesus speaks of the difference his people make in the world, he uses two small, often unnoticed, insignificant substances -- salt and light. Today, we come by both quite easily. Some areas complain of having too much light, calling it light pollution. Some of us must limit our intake of salt. In the days of Jesus, these metaphors took on a quite different meaning. Light can be very fragile, but even in small quantities it makes quite a difference. When the darkness is particularly great, one does not need a huge amount of light to make a significant difference. Light and salt depend upon their environment to have the influence they are to have. The church is not everything you need. Your families, your neighborhood, your work, your government, are all vital parts of your life. Yet, the church has a message and a life that is to enlighten and salt every part of your life. Jesus calls his followers to engage the world, rather than separate from it. He hinted at this when he left the community John the Baptist was forming in the wilderness and returned to Galilee.
13 From Matthew[1] we read, "You are the salt of the earth; (v. 13b = Luke 14:34-5, Mark 9:49-50), but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? The point is the psychological possibility of a change in the followers of Jesus. The warning concerns the earthly being of the follower, for one who becomes such through the word of Jesus loses all value if his or her faith vacillates and the person falls away.[2] It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. Here is a picture of a commodity valuable to human beings, but it has lost the one property that gives it value. For Jesus, the state of Judaism as embodied in its religious leadership in the first century is described in this way. However, Matthew warns the followers of Jesus that they share a responsibility to be a purifying and preserving influence in the world, and they will miss their vocation in this world if they do not. In Mark, salt is a quality the followers of Jesus possess that should bring peace. In Luke, the savorless salt is the follower of Jesus who does not fulfill the demand of self-sacrifice and renunciation.[3] Such a saying may have occasioned surprise, for salt contained impurities. As I understand it, a first century rabbi stated that just as salt cannot lose its saver, Judaism could not lose what is essential to it. On the lips of Jesus, the saying suggests that the community that follows Jesus is the salt. The saying speaks to the danger of something valuable that loses the essential quality that makes it valuable. Further, salt was not just for flavoring, but also for preserving. Tiny amounts of salt could also fertilize soil that lost its nutrients. One must scatter the salt around for the salt to do any good. Jesus has a concern for the influence of his followers in the world. The saying suggests a distinction between outsider and insider in the sense that Jesus expected his followers to reconsider and live from that they which they previously learned. Of course, the invitation to that change of heart and life is open to all.
The preserving power of salt was well-known in Israel; thus, the ancient Israelites covered their sacrifices in salt as a sign of the eternal nature and preservation of the covenant between God and God’s people: a “covenant of salt” (Leviticus 2:13; Numbers 18:19). Ezekiel mentions the rubbing of salt on newborn infants, to both dry the skin and protect the child from evil (Ezekiel 16:1-5). Salt could also be used as a sign of judgment and destruction, as in Judges 9:45 where Abimelech destroyed the city of Shechem and “scattered salt over it” “sowed it with salt.” It is no wonder, then, that Jesus wraps up this section of teaching on the cost of discipleship by using salt as a metaphor for the kind of valuable effort required of anyone who would follow him.
Part of our problem today with this metaphor is that salt is used for flavoring and is getting bad press anyway. We want a salt free diet. In the days of Jesus, salt was a precious commodity. It was preservative, being the lifeline when fresh food became scarce. It was a fertilizer as farmers worked it into the soil to restore lost chemical nutrients, of course not using too much so that it would be negative in productivity. The image of the earth suggests the fertilizer vision is the most appropriate. Any salt that no longer helps make the land more productive is not fit for anything. Salt is an element that one must scatter over and spread out to be effective. One must sprinkle salt around.
If we apply the saying to the church of recent times, the way salt loses its savor is the process of secularization, a process that involves trusting a mindset of trusting in the current political and economic ideologies. It ought not to surprise us that that the world is secular, for that is what it is, and always will be. How it manifests itself will differ, but it will always trust in the gathering of wealth and physical power. However, “when the church becomes secular, it is the greatest conceivable misfortune both for the church and the world.” What Karl Barth means by this is that the church engages the world so deeply that it identifies itself with the communities the world forms. This is what happens when the church wants to be only “for” the world, nation, and culture. It loses its distinguishing character and therefore its importance, meaning and reason for existence. The secularization of the church, in all its attempts to connect to the world, is its alienation from the world. In the world of modernity and post-modernity, the church needs to engage liberal democracy and its political and economic arrangements but not be captivated by them. Liberal democracies will always generate their opposite in revolutionary movements from the political Left and the political Right, but the church must always resist identifying itself with either. The irony is that when the church identifies itself with such political and economic realities, reconciling itself to them, it opens itself to alienation. The reason, of course, is that if the church is only “for” the world, it is no longer “for” Christ and “for” God.[4] When the church is only for the world, it fails to recognize the ways in which the political and economic ideologies and institutions of the world do not satisfy the longing of humanity for peace and just arrangements. Sometimes, the church may be at peace with the world precisely because it has lost its saltiness.[5] The church may behave in such a way as to provide no objection to the world, making itself invisible, and therefore forfeiting its right to exist.[6] The Christian community has no other task. The task is simple and unassuming. If God wills to accomplish much through its labor, that is the affair of God. The Christian community can neither bring this about nor enforce it. It has no right to ask for successes. It must simply hold itself in readiness for God.[7]
Verses 14-16 (v. 15 = Mark 4:21, Luke 11:33, v. 14, 16 unique to Matthew) 14 From Matthew,[8] "You (that is disciples) are the light of the world. In verse 14b, Jesus offers a secular single stranded Jewish proverb,[9] A city built on a hill cannot be hid. The light of the city gathers in one place. Many small lights gathered in a community will make light that one cannot hide. The church is to be that hilltop night light for the world. The saying suggests that Jesus seems to have still lived with the prophetic expectation of the end-time pilgrimage of the peoples to Zion as the place of the proclaiming of the righteous will of God. Until that time comes, the community of believers is to bear witness in the nations around it to the rule of God that has dawned as the visible city on a hill that one cannot hide.[10] 15 No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, a small receptacle on legs, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. It pictures the folly of placing the lighted lamp in a place where the light is useless. One must expose the flame to the surrounding air to have sufficient oxygen to burn brightly. The disciples are the light that shine in the world and bring glory to God. Matthew had in mind the one room Palestinian home of the common person. The saying becomes a warning to the church. The world is averse to the light. Nevertheless, in its life, the church is to attract people to the light. In Mark, the lamp represents the truth concerning the rule of God with the intention that it be displayed to the world. In Luke 11:33, the lamp represents truth shining by its own light. It is a biting comment on the religious leaders who opposed Jesus.[11] Matthew provides the application:[12] 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. The disciples will be a light by letting others see their good works and glorify God. Light is useless when one covers it up. Further, the light will not continue to burn if one covers it up and deprives it of its oxygen.
The image of the community of the followers of Jesus being salt and light in the world is one worthy of reflection.
People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness. They point each other to flashes of light here and there, and remind each other that they reveal the hidden but real presence of God. They discover that there are people who heal each other’s wounds, forgive each other’s offenses, share their possessions, foster the spirit of community, celebrate the gifts they have received, and live in constant anticipation of the full manifestation of God's glory.[13]
The church also grow secular by setting its light under a bushel and losing its saltiness. Yet, Jesus Christ never becomes identical with secular history. Christ in the world remains light and salt, shaming and awakening the church, judging and saving the church. Christ maintains the particularity of the church in relation to all other occurrences in history.[14] One who believes in Jesus Christ is the lighted candle. To believe is also to give yourself as light. One cannot acknowledge Christ privately without also confessing oneself as a Christian.[15]
I can illustrate the struggle of the church influencing American culture with an article from the New York Times, around Christmas 2010, by Ross Douthat. He begins by discussing the difficulty of being a Christian around Christmas time. This quickly expands, however, into the notion of the changing culture in America, and the difficulty amidst the changes. He refers to two books that have helped him wrestle with this. One book is American Grace by Robert Putnam (Harvard) and David Campbell (Notre Dame). The book is quite technical. It takes much work to mine any nuggets one can find, according to some. As if to spare me the challenging work of reading its 550 pages, he summarizes the book by saying that it examines the role that religion plays in binding up the social fabric of the nation. Society reaps enormous benefits from religious people engaging it, while suffering few of the potential downsides. Widespread churchgoing makes Americans more altruistic and more engaged with their communities, more likely to volunteer and more inclined to give to secular and religious charities. Yet at the same time, thanks to Americans’ ever-increasing tolerance, this country has been spared the kind of sectarian conflict that often accompanies religious zeal.
All that sounds like the church is being what it is supposed to be, at one level. It is being salt and light in American culture.
Another book, by James Davison Hunter, To Change the World, presents a different picture. The United Methodist Church says it makes disciples “for the transformation of the world.” The problem with this statement of the mission of the church is that the world is passing away. The world is always going its way of focusing upon political and economic power. Its principalities and powers will always do what they do. The mission statement itself assumes a relationship with the world that the church simply does not have. The world is the darkness in which the church must be light. In any case, this author discusses the vain attempts by Christians, whether from the political Left or Right, to engage the culture from a “populist” perspective and have lost. Both groups express themselves in the “language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment and desire for conquest.” Thanks in part to this bunker mentality, American Christianity has become what Hunter calls a “weak culture” — one that mobilizes but does not convert, alienates rather than attracts, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future. He argues that the Christian churches are influential only in the “peripheral areas” of our common life. One of his central theses is that "culture" does not usually change in a populist, bottom-up manner. Rather, it changes by the influence of a small network of elites with symbolic power to create and change the institutions in which we live. Churches used to be among such elites. They are no more.
Douthat concludes that believing Christians are no longer the influence they once were, either upon popular culture or upon the elites with symbolic power. The term for this is secularity, as the culture and the political class remove themselves in an increasingly open away from the church. Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that is becoming less friendly to Christians.
The church is rapidly becoming a minority movement in a culture it helped create. I would be among those who feel some loss there. Yet, in the process, we may feel more connected to the tiny band of followers to whom Jesus first spoke these words concerning being salt and light.
Salt and light exist for the benefit of its environment, providing purification, seasoning, preservation, and for the benefit of that which it illuminates. Jesus reminds us that the way in which his followers engage the world can become less effective than it might be. This fact should not surprise us. We know we are sinners. We know we are not perfect. Yet, it should sadden us that sometimes, the salt does not taste like it should. Sometimes our light does not shine as it should. We blend in too well at times with our surroundings so that others could not tell much difference between the world and us. The philosopher Spinoza once said:
I have often wondered that persons who make boasts of professing the Christian religion - namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all people - should quarrel with such rancorous animosities, and display daily toward one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues which they profess, is the readiest criterion of their faith.[16]
Further, in Matthew 5:17-20, Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law. The relationship of Jesus to the Mosaic Law is in debate here.[17] Jesus is a sage with independent and personal authority. Verses 17-19 are in legal style, expressing the attitude of Jesus toward Torah.[18] 17 (unique to Matthew) in an expression of the prophetic self-consciousness of Jesus that would find a home in the Jewish-Christian community and its debates legal debates,[19] "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come (referring to the ministry of Jesus) not to abolish but to fulfill. Jesus clearly and sharply expresses his authority.[20] The salvation history of the past has been transcended, having an eschatological ring, claiming to be the eschatological messenger of God, claiming to bring the final revelation of Torah.[21] Jesus sees his mission as fulfillment of the Old Testament as a declaration of the will of God. He actualizes the will of God made known in the Old Testament, along the lines outlined in verses 21-48. He has come to fulfill the word of God, his word and deed being an act of obedience by fulfilling the promise of God.[22] The early church accepted the canon of the Synagogue. Early Christians added the New Testament, enlarging a canon already given, extending it as a new action of God. The early church did not try to adopt the sacred writings of other religions as such a “preface,” an approach that would have made the missionary task much easier. Yet, the canon of the synagogue is not just a preface or introduction to the New. It is Scripture.[23] This saying suggests neither Jesus nor his followers have the goal of dissolving Judaism and its Torah. The saying accepts it. It does not even require that followers of Jesus must abandon or replace it.[24] However, it does mean that Torah is not untouchable but requires the new perspective Jesus will bring to it. In a saying that has the theme of not one serif, [25] (Luke 16:17) 18For truly I tell you, (the sole ground of his authority for the demand of God expressed through him[26]) until heaven and earth pass away (meaning never, or until the rule of God shows itself on earth), not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.[27] It reflects the argument in the early Christian community about whether Mosaic Law was still binding on Christians. According to this saying, it is.[28] Given the regard this passage shows for the smallest letter of the Hebrew Bible, “we must be on our guard against trying to say anything different.” These words belong to revelation and their writing by the Spirit.[29] 19 (unique to Matthew) Therefore, whoever breaks in the sense of transgressing and invalidating one of the least of these commandments, the rabbis distinguishing between light and weighty commandments in a way that suggests the effort demanded of the believer and the reward promised for keeping it, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. The scribes erode Torah and teach others to do so, even though they accuse Jesus of doing this, for Jesus upholds the validity of Torah over the halacha of the rabbis.[30] The focus on “teach” here shows it was customary to think of his ministry in terms of his teaching more so than what he did.[31] Such a paradoxical formulation of those who belong to the rule of God represents the central theme of the proclamation of Jesus.[32] Does the distinction between great or least in the rule of God mean there are various places in heaven? The fulfilling of the Torah in verse 17 has its basis in verses 18-19. Faithfulness to each individual commandment of the Torah would appear to be the goal.
The lectionary division assumes that verse 20 concludes the section begun in verse 17. 20 (unique to Matthew) For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. This notion of “entering” contains a future element to the teaching regarding the kingdom. The interpretive perspective of Jesus on Torah focuses on its intensification through confronting us with its internal challenge, rather than making ourselves content with external observance. The inspiration for this is the insight that the tenth commandment that forbids coveting, which itself focuses upon the internal, is the source of external disobedience.to the other nine commandments. The decisive element for Matthew is that the love commandment becomes the center of these intensified individual commandments. Based on the antitheses, the higher righteousness of the disciples is not only a quantitative increase of the fulfilling of the law - measured on the Torah - but also primarily a qualitative intensification of the life before God - measured on love. Disciples must live scripture as interpreted by Jesus. Matthew does not sense the tension between the qualitative fulfillment of the will of God in the antitheses, which the love commandment infinitely intensified, and the obedience toward all individual prescriptions of the Torah, which verses 17-19 seem to demand. The transition takes place smoothly and inconspicuously. In practice, the Matthean community has subordinated the many individual commandments of the Torah to the love commandment as the center. Matthew provided this introduction to ensure that no one would interpret the following antitheses as antinomian or as a break with the heritage of Israel. The concept that Jesus fulfills law and prophets completely and perfectly means that for Matthew there is no longer any other way of access to the Bible of Israel than by way of Jesus. Therefore, the preamble to the antitheses has at the same time the effect of a reprimand of Israel. Matthew, who fixes the authority of the Bible through Jesus, can do no other than measure the scribes and Pharisees by the standard of the higher righteousness that Jesus sets. Measured by this standard, which is not theirs, their righteousness is not enough. Jesus accepts the Law, demanding that his followers need to seek a better righteousness than did its greatest champions.[33]
W. D. Davies, in his commentary on the Sermon, says that this text opening the Sermon stands as a guardian against every immoral or antinomian misunderstanding of the gospel. Using the skills of historical criticism and pop psychology, to explain it away, reassuring you that a nice person like Jesus would have never said something tough like this. Jesus is saying something like the following. I know of no way to do that with this text. Do you think I have come to help you weasel out of the law? Forget it, says Jesus. I have come to intensify, exceed, and deepen the frontal assault of the law. The peculiar brand of contemporary arrogance is that of the antinomian, which says: I am the only one who knows what is right for me and the measure of all things, for I make up the rules as I go along to suit the situation, so do not bother me with your judgments. I am doing the best I can. What right has Jesus or anyone else to tell me what I should do? Such antinomianism arises not out of an appreciation for the limits of the Law, but out of a lack of appreciation for any limits upon my own ego. Today, we need to hear the warning that antinomianism is a threat to our discipleship. We have moved from the awareness that just obeying a few rules makes you right to the conviction that no rules are right. Some rules are there precisely because if we follow them, they will make us free. An ethical person not only understands and obeys the rules, he or she also knows -- and embraces -- the purpose behind the rules. When Jesus wanted to lay out the ethical agenda for God's world, he did not ditch the rules that God handed down long ago on tablets to Moses. Instead, he "fulfilled" those rules by embodying them and teaching them with authority (5:17; 7:29). For Jesus, the rules were still important, but the principles behind the rules were even more important. It was not just about what was written in stone; it was about the character and law of God written on the hearts of God's people (Jer 31:33).
Jesus is rooted in the law, but he calls his disciples to live a life with a much deeper rootedness than the legalism of scribes and Pharisees. The Pharisees were concerned with what people did or did not do with their hands. Jesus was more concerned about what people had in their hearts and how that would translate into their relationships with people as a sign of God's new world. In these verses, the ethical pattern for the people of God's world emerges. It is a pattern that goes beyond the letter of the law, to the spirit of the law. It goes beyond what we do with our hands, to who we are in our hearts. It recognizes that external behavior often emerges from an internal temperament.
Jesus will take the 10th commandment, with its command directed toward the heart and thus toward the inappropriate desire for the property or wife of the neighbor and recognized that each of the 10 commandments suggested such a righteousness that went beyond external compliance and dealt with the heart.
The Bible is a human word in that its collection of letters, wisdom, prophecies, accounts of historical events, occur in historical contexts written by people during a 1300-year process. If we give precedence to the word of God, we are willing to lay our lives alongside what we read in the Bible and allow the Bible to check our views of God, self, and others. If the Bible is an opinion piece, a poetic insight, or debatable philosophical points, then it gives the church of today much freedom to pursue its own understanding of what God wants, which may lead such persons to say the Bible is wrong and is not a reliable witness of what God wants in the world. We recognize that our way is not always best, and in fact, that we often get God and discipleship wrong, if left to our devices. To accept this special role for the Bible is to have a degree of humility concerning our lives. Whatever guidance we need as to who God is and who we are to be does not simply well up from inside us. In fact, we admit that the guidance we most need comes from outside you. The reason is that we recognize in the Bible a special working of God in Israel and in Jesus Christ. Such witnesses to what God is doing in history and in human lives become that “check,” that external reference that gets us out of ourselves and directs us to God. Every preacher and teacher in the church ought to consider it of the greatest responsibilities, sometimes with fear and trembling, to stand before people and share the Word of God. The church always wrestles with what this Word means for today. Pastors do so in a quite personal and public way. If we conclude that this Word is simply a human word, then we will be quite free to say something different from it. We become the judge of the Word. Arrogance can easily be the result. However, if pastor and church have a bond with Scripture in a way that it remains a guide, check, and an external reference in what they believe and how they live, they must exercise enough care that they do not say something different.
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[2] Bertram, TDNT, IV, 838.
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[13] Henri J. M. Nouwen, You Are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living, (Crown, 2017), 337.
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[16] (Spinoza, Ethics, Chapter 6)
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[22] Delling, TDNT, VI, 293-4.
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[27] "Until heaven and earth pass away, not one jot nor one tittle shall pass away from the law, until all be fulfilled". So writes Matthew, and Luke, "It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one tittle of the law to fall." Who can say whether the rhetorical fulness of Matthew, or the pointed brevity of Luke is more likely to be original? Is the copiousness of Matthew that of the Galilean gospel, or that of (say) the Antiochene pulpit? If we look at the context, we observe that Matthew is developing a flowing discourse (5.17-48), whereas Luke is giving us one of those short paragraphs packed with gnomic sentences which are an occasional feature of his style (16.15-l8, cf. 12.49-53, 16.8-13, 17.1-6) We are left in complete indecision. Either could be adapting the other's text to his own purpose.
[28] According to the Jesus Seminar, the view that the law remains in tact for followers of Jesus contradicts the relaxed attitude of Jesus, especially pertaining to the Sabbath and ritual purity.
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[30] Grundmann, TDNT, IV, 534.
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