MATTHEW 5: 13 -20 

Matthew in the Margins…5th S. after the Epiphany…Revised 2017 

Awhile back we were introduced to salt with real ‘zing’ in it. Mined from ancient Oz salt deposits. It’s the salt we go for now. All the time! Today Jesus isn’t focussed on us eating salt. He’s on about us becoming salt! Salt that zings with God & for God. In the O.T. there are references to salt as a sign of covenant with God.¹ Apart from anything else He means here, Jesus is saying we’re to bring out the flavour of what He stands for as a sign of our being faithful to the ancient covenants. 

William Barclay² refers to a practice in some synagogues that apostates wanting to be received back into the fold had to lie across the doorway of the meeting place, & that some early churches took that idea on board! The point of course being that salt that's lost its ‘saltness’ is fit only for trampling. (Maybe we could sneak 'A Form for the Stomping of Penitents' into the next Prayer Book?) Seriously, avoid such a fate by zinging with God & keeping covenant!

In Jesus’ day dark was dark & light was light & never the twain would meet. The sharpness of this contrast lies behind all the dark / light imagery in the Gospels. There's no mistaking Christians who're lit with God from within; nor Christians who don’t zing with God! Jesus challenges half-heartedness for what it is: a failure to bring out the flavour of God in life, & a failure to keep covenant by being lit from within by God's Glory. Jesus, the most ‘God-filled’ Person ever, knows what He’s talking about!

Those who see keeping the Faith as a set of rules to be obeyed (or else!) often take refuge in what follows. At first glance Jesus appears to be taking a hard-line approach, but think it through. If the Law is the expression of the Will of the God of Love, then its fulfilment, right down to the last jot & tittle, will also be an expression of that Love. Human nature often seems to find it easier to lay down the Law (often for someone else!) than to Love.  Yet Jesus calls on us to become God’s kind of Zing in a world that’s lost its taste for God, & God’s kind of Light in a world growing darker & darker for many. 

It is often said that God's wrath is God's love seen from the wrong side. In which case let’s keep on the right side of God & discover, maybe to our surprise & delight, that we’re in God’s Kingdom of Heaven already, here on earth. An alternative way of looking at this issue might be that no matter how often we flip ‘the God coin’ it will always come down with a loving God facing us. Because it’s a double header!

¹ e.g. LEV 2:13   ²  Daily Bible Readings ad loc., Church of Scotland, undated, p.117