Matthew 5:13-20
So we’re reading from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Some have said that if you want to find the essence of Jesus’ message, then the best place to look is in these three chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, 6 and 7. Others have pointed out the Sermon on the Mount parallels the story of Moses. Moses goes up to the top of Mount Sinai to receive the Law of God, the most well-known part of it being the Ten Commandments. And now Jesus goes up to the top of a mountain to offer this sermon, an invitation to embrace the hope and peace of God in a new way. In fact the parallel to Moses is more than the mountain top. It includes other features of the story. For example, Moses and the Israelites passed through the waters of the sea on the way to freedom in the Promised Land, Jesus passes through the waters of Baptism to bring hope and freedom in the Gospel. There are many other parallels between the story of Moses and the story of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, I don’t have time to go into them this morning.
So here is Jesus on the mountaintop. He addressed a crowd of people with many needs and lots of potential. He knew all about their difficulties, but he also knew all about what they might become. It is the beauty and wonder of scripture that words spoken by Jesus centuries ago seem focused on you and me as we read and hear them. He spoke to them, as they gathered at the mountain to hear him. He speaks to you, as we gather to hear him. He speaks to challenge you, to comfort you, to rescue you, to find you, to save you, to help you find your way, to offer you recovery, to strengthen you, and to fill your heart with hope.
The Gospel is more than a promise about the future. It testifies to what God is doing with us right now! “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. You are a city set on a hill.” In sharing a simple message about salt and light, he told them that a new relationship with God is not only possible, but it is happening right now! If you sense that there is a gap, a misunderstanding, or a division between you and God, between you and someone else, between you and the world, Jesus' message is for you. Receive it with an open heart. Take his words seriously, because God takes you very seriously right now!
If you feel unworthy or unready, if you feel your faith is inadequate or incomplete, that’s normal, because in the presence of God, we are deeply aware of what is lacking. But hear Paul’s testimony to the Corinthians, when he writes: “Your faith does not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.” God gives abundantly, not because we have earned it, or deserve it, but because we need it. God does not concentrate on what we lack, but on what we can be given. And keep this in mind, Jesus is not saying that someday God will give or that someday you will receive; Jesus says God si already doing it, giving and giving and giving, to you, your family, your neighbor, your friend, to strangers you have never met, and even to your enemies.
We underestimate God all of the time, and we underestimate our own capacity for receiving from God. Jesus says “You are the salt of the earth”, but we have countless ways to neutralize the salt in us. Jesus says, “You are the light of the world”, but we have countless ways of hiding our light. “You are the salt of the earth … you are the light of the world”. Who, me? Change the world? I can’t even change my neighborhood. I can’t even change my own family. I can’t even change myself. And then we say to ourselves: "I can’t do it”, or “I give up”. The world is just too overwhelming to think that we could affect it in any way.
If you are headed down that road – I can’t do it or I give up – then we need to hear what Jesus says on the mountaintop. You may have heard these words before, but now we need to hear them again. There are few places in the Bible where the message is so affirming and uplifting. Your are the salt of the earth – not you will be the salt of the earth, or you might be the light of the world, or you could be the light of the world. YOU ARE … and that is a fresh place to begin again if your faith journey has been dead-ended or side-tracked, or put on hold.
On the mountaintop Jesus offers the hope and peace of God in a new way. It’s more than food for thought that he offers; it's an adventure. It's the stuff out of which enduring changes begin; it's what charges us up to engage in the mission of Christ. It's what puts wind in our sails. Jesus' words contain truth, but they also empower us to bring the truth to life. We call Jesus' teachings "Gospel" which means "good news." And if you could use some good news, you're in the right place. For now you are one of the invited ones, one of those invited by Jesus to become a living part of who he is and what he has to offer the world. As he sat on the hilltop talking, teaching, and encouraging, Jesus told them what would happen to those who open their hearts to God: they would be merciful, gentle, pure, peaceful, longing and thirsting for what is right and just in every dimension of their lives, they would bring a taste of God’s promise to the whole world, they would help light the way.
So often we make the mistake that we think that all Jesus speaks about has still to come, has still to be worked out in us. We think that we have to become gentle, that we have to become peacemakers, or to speak in terms of the gospel today, we think we should become the salt, that we should make ourselves a light, that we should be like a city on a hilltop. If only we could become these things, honestly and truly. But that is not what Jesus said. He said, "You ARE the salt, you ARE the light, you ARE that city." Jesus said, "whoever believes in me HAS eternal life, who believes in me IS in the kingdom." It is not a question that we should become, but that we should show, that we should manifest who we are, what we have, and to whom we belong.
We’ve been working on living lives of passionate spirituality. We have been learning that the problem isn’t that we lack spirituality, but that we don’t show our spiritual life to the world. We don’t demonstrate it in visible ways for others to see. Jesus calls us to the mountaintop to listen, to absorb, to show us what it’s all about so we can show it too!
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