Matthew 5-7: The Sermon on the Mount (4)

Identity and Vocation of Israel (5:13-16)

 Jesus details the passions that ground God’s people in faithfulness, a flourishing life, in the Beatitudes. In the short section that follows he addresses their identity and vocation (vv.13-16), their deepest convictions about God, themselves, and their calling in the world, their priorities.

“Jesus is calling the Israel of his day to be Israel indeed, now that he is there. What he says here can now be applied to all Christians, but its original meaning was a challenge to Jesus’ own contemporaries. God had called Israel to be the salt of the earth; but Israel was behaving like everyone else, with its power politics, its factional squabbles, its militant revolutions. How could God keep the world from going bad – the main function of salt in the ancient world – if Israel, his chosen ‘salt’, had lost its distinctive taste?”[1]

Wright’s reference to “chosen” salt gives us the clue we need. Chosen here means covenant. Salt, then, points to Israel’s identity as God’s covenant people. Don Garlington, in his thorough study of the image of salt and its covenantal associations,[2] discerns four nuances of the image:

-covenant fidelity which preserves the ongoing reality of the covenant (Lev.2:13).      

-covenant fellowship, including that of the table, and thus form a society in communion with the covenant Lord.

-purifying creation, thereby causing it to be better than before—a new creation.

-a punitive function of salt. The covenant rejected will lead to judgment.

Additionally, salt as covenant also carries priestly (Num.18:19) and royal (2 Chr.13:5) nuances. These offices represent the character of the people as a whole (Ex.19:5-6). And Jesus has just identified them with the prophets as well. The covenant people are a prophetic, priestly, and royal people!

All this is consistent with the mandate given this people through God’s covenant with Abraham. When Jesus declares “You are the salt of the earth” (v.13) and warns of the salt losing it saltiness, failing to be the community under the fourfold description above, he is calling it to remember its identity and calling. And this in the light of the crisis of a last chance with judgment at the doorstep.

“You are the light of the world” (v.14). This image pushes in the same covenantal direction (Isa.42:6; 49:6). And they are this light as a “city built on a hill.” Jerusalem is to be a beacon of light for the world both now (Dt.4:5-8) and on that day when God intervenes to set all things right (Isa.2:1-4; Mic.4:1-4). With Jesus declaration that the kingdom of heaven had drawn near, the day of that divine intervention had come. The day for God’s city to shine with the light of his presence and “give light to all in the house” (v.15).

Jesus dares to make a connection we too often fear to make: “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (v.16). We tend to privatize faith, see it as an inner reality we pursue in the individual practices of devotion. The kind of public, social holiness Jesus demands here runs counter to the privatization and individualization of faith so common in our land.

Jesus and the Law (5:17-20)

The final word Jesus gives about the priorities of his followers is about himself. That makes sense doesn’t it? He is to be our chief priority is all things. Jesus trumps everything else that wants to be our priority. I did not come at to diminish or dismiss the law or the prophets (v.17), Jesus says. On the contrary, I have come to fill up and fill out everything those holy words say and mean. As Kirk notes, “we consistently find Matthew telling us that Jesus' life is taking the shape of Israel's story—not in terms of fulfilling predictive prophecies, but rather in terms of embodying and filling up its story in unexpected ways.”[3]

So far from him slighting the law and the prophets, Jesus lifts them up so high that he insists not even the smallest mark of a Hebrew letter will be left behind but all will be fulfilled in and through him (v.18). Failure to keep and teach the law correlates with one’s position in the kingdom of heaven (v.19). The rub, however, is that he is the point and climax of all scripture. And he’s just the point of contention between his movement and the “scribes and the Pharisees” (v.20). As Wright says,

“The scribes and the Pharisees do indeed teach a way of being faithful to God, a way of behaving in accordance with God’s covenant. But God’s own sovereign rule, the ‘kingdom of heaven’, is even now breaking in; and those who want to belong to the new world he is opening up must discover a way of covenant behaviour that goes far, far beyond anything the scribes and Pharisees ever dreamed of.”[4]

The shape of Jesus’ fulfilment of the law and prophets, however, took a very different form than any of them expected or could predicted. No wonder they were skeptical! They treated keeping Israel’s scriptures as the way to purity, and purity as Israel keeping it distinctiveness from the pagan Gentile world. This was a misreading of long standing by Jesus’ time. He filled up those scriptures by filling out this neglected and ignored aspect of God’s promise to Abraham to bring his blessing to all peoples through them (Gen.12:3). So in and through him Jesus taught and lived these scriptures back into their God-intended shape: being God’s people for the pagan Gentile world.

When Jesus calls for an “excessive” righteousness he means one that exceeds this nationalistic “purity” of keeping away from the unclean Gentiles. That’s what he lived and died for in his earthly ministry. He called his fellow Jews to repent and become the kind of Israel God could use to “fulfil” his Gen.12:3 purposes for the Gentiles.

This is why one cannot get into the kingdom of heaven apart from Jesus. It’s not a matter of legalism, trying to earn one’s salvation by keeping all the laws (popular though that misconception has been). It’s a matter of being aligned with God’s purposes and committed to the way set forth by his messiah, Jesus. It’s a matter of faith vs. unfaith.

It’s Jesus that brings these words and ideas to life anew and afresh. He is God’s salt and light in human flesh. Though his work focuses on Israel, he does not fail to engage Gentiles when the opportunity presents itself. He invites all who follow him to share his “yoke” (11:29) and learn from him. He is the kingdom of heaven in flesh-and-blood, up close to us and personal.

Salt, Light, Jesus, and Us

Wright offers a fitting conclusion:

“He was the salt of the earth. He was the light of the world: set up on a hill-top, crucified for all the world to see, becoming a beacon of hope and new life for everybody, drawing people to worship his father, embodying the way of self-giving love which is the deepest fulfilment of the law and the prophets.  That’s why these sayings, originally applied to Israel, now apply to all those who follow Jesus and draw on his life as the source of their own. How does this challenge affect us today? Where does the world need salt and light right now, and how can we, through following Jesus, provide it?”[5]

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[1] Wright, Matthew for Everyone: 892.

[2] Don Garlington, “’The Salt of the Earth’ in Covenantal Perspective,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 54 (2011), 748.

[3] Kirk, “Conceptualizing Fulfilment,” 94.

[4] Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1: 902.

[5] Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1: 907-912.