Sayings of Jesus: Beautiful Attitudes (Part II)

Last time, we looked at ‘The Beatitudes’—a series of eight sayings of Jesus that begin the discourse we call the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 through 7. This time, we’ll look at the three metaphorical images which follow directly on—salt, light, and a city set on a hill—picturing God’s people, individually and collectively, when we are living out the Beatitudes.

Here's the passage, in Matthew 5:13 through 16:

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

Taking them in chronological order, what might Jesus have had in mind by the metaphorical image of salt applied to being his disciples? The most obvious answer, that many of us will have heard said, is acting as a preservative. In a hot, Mediterranean climate without refrigeration, salting meat or fish was a way of averting decay—‘the earth’ here being understood in the sense of society: his disciples’ influence among the people. It’s the same word we see in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Your will be done on earth …’  

In a similar sense, Jesus may have had in mind salt’s properties as an important flavouring. The apocryphal Ecclesiasticus 39:26 speaks of salt as one of the ‘basic necessities’ of human life, along with, amongst other things, wine (with that quality of wisdom, how it never made it into the canon is a mystery). Keep in mind that no one at the time would have had health concerns about too much salt in a diet. Since salt had numerous uses in the ancient world, it’s also possible that Jesus intended a wide-ranging application, of being a good, flavoursome influence in society in multiple ways.

Far more puzzling, though, is the next statement: “if salt loses its saltiness …” Why puzzling? Because salt doesn’t lose its saltiness! I’m no scientist, but they say it can’t happen from a chemical perspective. The only way it can happen—and this is more to do with losing its flavour—is when it is diluted or otherwise mixed with other things. The ancient world may not have known about chemical compounds, but they knew that about salt in practice. I think it’s likely Jesus had in mind his disciples not diluting the distinctive flavour of their faith—diluting the ‘beautiful attitudes’ in their lives—through mixing them with the world’s ‘ugly attitudes’. Being “in the world” (preserving and flavouring the world) but not “of the world” (diluting with the world, or ‘mixing in’ some of the world). This fits with how Jesus describes the consequences: a ‘worldly’ faith diluted by too much of ‘the world’ is “no longer good for anything …” Its positive influence—the flavouring that makes it so appealing—is compromised. As we might say, it’s no longer ‘fit for purpose’.

Perhaps most relevant of all, though, is something that doesn’t usually get a mention in either commentaries or sermons. In the Old Testament, salt is symbolic of God’s covenant relationship with his people—see Leviticus 2:13; Numbers 18:19; and 2 Chronicles 13:5. Might it be too much of a stretch to read this as Jesus saying, “If a covenantal relationship loses its ‘covenant-ness’—loses the covenant characteristics of love, faithfulness, exclusivity, and commitment that give it its distinctive flavour—then it’s no longer what it’s meant to be”?        

The next metaphor seems more straightforward: “You are the light of the world.” Interestingly, in both of these “you are” statements—salt and light—the Greek word is plural, not singular (English has only one word ‘you’, which we determine to be singular or plural by its context, but NT Greek has two). So in the first instance, it’s centred on the light we give to the world collectively, as a community, not by each of us individually.

It’s interesting that, in John 8:12, Jesus speaks of himself as the light of the world. If we pair these sayings together, it suggests that we are to be a light to the world in the same way as Jesus. Or more precisely, we are to be Jesus’ light to the world, reflecting the light of Jesus, in his place. And it’s not just us as individual Christians who are to be this light (our modern individual-centred rather than community-centred mindset tends to lead us to think in those terms—reinforced by ideas such as, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine …”). Rather, it’s our light as communities of believers living out what Jesus-following looks like together, for others to see and experience as our witness to Jesus’ power and presence among us.

That said, there’s a ‘both/and’ to this metaphor, since what we are collectively derives from the sum of what we are individually. This both/and seems to be what Jesus is referencing here when he distinguishes the light of an individual oil lamp in a house from the light that comes from all of the lights from all of the houses in a city. The reference to a “city set on a hill” is undoubtedly calling to mind the city of Jerusalem, set on Mount Zion, which can be seen from a long way away (the classic view in many photographs of Jerusalem is of the Temple Mount from the Mount of Olives).

Finally, a word on the nature of that ‘light’ in each case—both individual lights and collective light. The light is “good deeds.” Good deeds get a bad rap in Reformed theology (which I’m happy to concede reflects a distortion of Reformed theology, but it’s nonetheless prevalent), where good deeds are looked upon with some disdain. The reason is that they’re perceived to relate to “qualifying for heaven” or “earning God’s love” by good deeds. But this is not the same thing at all (there is no way that Jesus was saying anything remotely like that in any of his references to good deeds or good works). Read Scripture without that prejudice, and messages such as this one from Jesus come through loud and clear everywhere. Good deeds are not antithetical to faith, they are the fruit and the evidence of an authentic faith. As James, the brother of Jesus, says, in a typically direct, say-it-like-it-is Jewish fashion, in James 2:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? … But someone will say, ‘You have faith; I have deeds.’ Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that … You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? … As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.                      

Isn’t it interesting that Jesus should say it’s our good deeds that glorify our Father in heaven? The way that many Reformed evangelicals think and speak, you would think it’s their gospel message that glorifies him: winning souls by intellectual persuasion through persuasive apologetics. OK, I’m swinging the pendulum hard the other way to make a point. But there’s another ‘both/and’ to be had here, rather than the ‘either/or’ that is, at least by implication, far too common. We must excise evangelicalism of its unhealthy disdain for ‘works’, which is the legacy of a fight with mediaeval Catholicism that is now long past.