Salt, Light and Fulfilling the Law (5 of 9)

Salt and light are usually preached as two nice images for Christian influence.

They are not new images. Both were already Israel’s job description, and Jesus is telling a particular people, in a particular decade, that the job is about to happen.

Who Was Already Supposed to Be the Light?

Israel, and the calling is old.

Isaiah has the servant given as a light to the nations, so that salvation reaches the ends of the earth. The vocation was never to be a favoured people while everyone else stayed in the dark. It was to be the means by which the rest were reached.

So when Jesus says you are the light of the world, he is not inventing a role. He is telling his hearers that the role they were given centuries ago is arriving, and that they are it.

The city on a hill carries the same freight. Jerusalem was the city, elevated, visible, the place the nations were supposed to stream toward.

What Does Losing Saltiness Mean?

Salt that has stopped doing what salt does is not a metaphor for a lukewarm personality.

It is a warning to a people about their function. Salt preserves and it flavours, and salt that does neither is simply grit. Thrown out and trodden underfoot is a hard image and it is aimed at a vocation not being carried out.

That reading fits what follows. The sermon is not a set of personal improvement targets. It describes what a people looks like when it is finally doing the thing it exists for.

Did Jesus Abolish the Law?

He says the opposite, and the wording matters.

Not to abolish but to fulfil. Not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until everything has happened.

Fulfil is not the same as keep, and it is not the same as replace. It carries the sense of bringing something to the point it was always heading toward. A promise is fulfilled when the thing promised arrives.

So the law is not being cancelled and it is not being left exactly as it was. It is reaching its destination.

What Is the Righteousness That Exceeds the Pharisees?

Not more rule-keeping, which is the reading that makes the sentence terrifying.

The Pharisees were the serious ones. Anyone hearing “unless your righteousness exceeds theirs” and thinking of quantity has been handed an impossible bar and an obvious despair.

What follows in the sermon is not a longer list. It is a series of intensifications that go past behaviour to the thing behind it. Not merely no murder but no murderous anger. Not merely no adultery but no adulterous looking.

That is not more law. It is the law reaching what it was aiming at, which is a people whose insides match their outsides.

Why Does This Come Before the Hard Sayings?

Because it sets the terms for everything after it.

Take the antitheses without this section and they read as a stricter code. Take them with it and they read as a description of the law arriving where it was always going.

The order is deliberate. Identity first, you are salt and light. Then the vocation, this is what the law was for. Then the specifics, this is what it looks like.

Reverse that order and the sermon becomes a burden. In the order Matthew gives it, the specifics are consequences rather than conditions.

Part of a series on the Sermon on the Mount. See also the Beatitudes.

Footnotes2

1. That both images were already Israel's job is easy to verify and it changes the sermon's audience from individuals to a people. A modern reader hearing you are the light of the world naturally hears you personally. The original hearers would have heard the nation's oldest commission being handed back to them.
2. Fulfil is the word to press on. It is not obey and it is not abolish, and English has no single term that carries it well. The nearest is what happens to a promise when the thing promised turns up.

Sources

N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-15 (SPCK, 2002), on Matt 5:13-20. Supports the reading of salt and light as Israel's existing vocation rather than new metaphors, and the account of fulfilment as arrival rather than abolition or replacement. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 5:13-20, Isa 42:6 and 49:6.

Where the sourcing stops: the reading of the exceeding righteousness as intensification rather than quantity is the standard interpretation of what the following section does, rather than a claim Matthew makes in that verse.