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S. Epiphany 5.26 Matt. 5:13-20

‘You are the salt of the earth… you are the light of the world’

And, as Luther says: ‘what does this mean’? Though, actually, Luther doesn’t ask what it means—that’s not a Lutheran question, because it’s not like Jesus’ words are some puzzle that must be interpreted by sophisticated extra-scriptural human derived hermeneutics—as if we can only understand the scriptures after we’ve studied books and books on exegesis and interpretation and have Ph.d’s in philology. No, the word of the LORD is plain and clear and little children are best positioned to grasp it (because they don’t over-think it 😉

What Luther asks in the catechism is “what is that”? What is it to be ‘salt of the earth’? What is it to be ‘the light of the world’?

I have to say that Matthew’s Gospel (like all the scriptures) appears a simple, off the cuff narrative about stuff that he saw traipsing after Jesus for 3 years, in no particular order. But the Holy Spirit guided the apostles and there is actually quite a sophisticated arrangement of the narrative—that again, children intuitively grasp because they don’t approach the Story with expectations of how stories should be told… 😉

In this case, while Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ first extended discourse to his disciples, it can only be understood after you’ve gone through the entire scriptures (several times at least, to be honest), especially the end of the Story with Jesus’ death and resurrection before it all comes clear.

But leading with the Sermon on the Mount (Luke buries it in the middle of his Gospel, going at the thing a bit differently) makes the hearer… curious. ‘What is that?!’, indeed!? How can the poor in spirit be happy, and the ones pursued for righteousness’ sake be happiest of all?!

It makes no sense until… you see Jesus became poorest of all (you can’t be any poorer than dead as Flannery O’Connor well observed) giving up everything on the cross as the sacrifice for our sins, pursued and hounded his whole 3 year ministry for the righteousness that was in him and that made the church bureaucrats jealous because it showed up their “righteousness” for the money-grabbing, virtue signaling scam it really is, which was why they had to kill him!

But seeing the crucified Christ risen and victorious—as the apostles did, it makes sense. Only by sharing Jesus‘ dying—only by being pursued and hounded by the world all our lives as he was, do we enter the kingdom of heaven. Because, the suffering and the sorrows, the hounding and the harassing kills the old Adam!—the sin in us—quite effectively and puts the light and life of Jesus into us by faith through his word and sacraments, through the quite disinterested self-abandonment of adoration that comes in worshiping Jesus, idolizing him like he’s God or Something!!!

And seeing that Jesus comes to lure us into sharing his suffering, his dying, so that the sin in us gets burned up (by the Light that shines from him as the apostles saw on the mount of the Transfiguration) gets replaced by his Light, his life, by the constant forgiveness of our sins that happens in the Divine Service, the worship of Jesus as we’re engaged in right now, that’s how we come to see what IT is—how we could also be the salt of the earth, the light of the world…

This is the crux of the Gospel, as Luther rediscovered it from close reading of the scriptures, from becoming absorbed into the Story, the only real world, destined for autocracy. It’s simple, but profound, complex but not complicated…

Here’s the rub: nothing we are or do can make us salt and light as Jesus is! In fact, our most sincere efforts to keep the Torah, the Way of Life God made us to follow only make us worser. “Sick people,” as Luther observed, “sometimes get well, but they never get better.” The harder we try to be good (‘there is no try, be or be not!’), the worser we get, as Paul laments, “the good that I will, I do not do, but the evil I will not, that I do!… Only Grace from God through Jesus Christ our Lord delivers me from that!

Being inveterate legalists—rule-following pragmatistic narcissists only interested in how I can get the good things I want by my own works to use for my own ends, just gaming the System, greedily, not really interested in truth, beauty, or goodness in a disinterested self-abandoning Way—we miss the crux of the cross…

There’s a way that sin doesn’t matter at all. God will always, has always already forgiven all your sin! Like Doritos, “crunch away, he’ll make more”. It’s no big deal. Nothing to lose sleep over. But the legalist concludes, “well, then: God loves to forgive sin. I love to commit it. This is the beginning of beautiful friendship!”

Children don’t fall into that trap until the adult in them comes to dominate. They idolize their super-heroes, want to be Batman, Superman, Spider-Man. They play at that because they know the Good when they see him, and love him, for Christ’s sake. That they fail in being like their heroes does not daunt them. They pick themselves up after falling and try to fly a little farther, next time…

Luther, child-like as he always was, had trouble understanding the antinomians like Agricola who thought forgiveness of sin was like a 007 license to kill, a license to sin with impunity. Only a stupid, legalistic rule-following narcissist who has no real love for Jesus would think that! Luther had trouble realizing the world is actually full of people like that, and the church— especially the high offices in the church, like bishop or president—are mostly filled with such people! But slowly, late in life, Luther saw things as they are…

We don’t do good works in order to be saved! That approach of ‘running the verbs’ ourselves, ‘doing the doing’ will not result either in goodness or salvation. Nah; we do good works the same way little kids play at being Superman: because JESUS always already puts himself into us, calls us to this! We do good works because we’ve already been saved from sin, death, and hell by JESUS! So we won’t wallow in the swamp. We’ll soar heavenwards with JESUS!

See… by Baptism washing over our little heads, Gospel Word sneaking in our ears, the body and blood of Jesus going in our mouths, Christ’s salt, Jesus’ light is put into us freely, gratis, so that we are the salt of the earth! We are the light of the world! And JESUS makes us so, by communing with us, now…(!)

But… if we look for the salt or the light in ourselves, we’ll never find it. It’s for our neighbor to see and marvel at, as Luther rightly observes! It’s something you catch out of the corner of your eye and realize it’s not you, it’s JESUS working through you, his Spirit blowing you up, like a kite in a high wind, to the place where Peace, surpassing all understanding, guards your heart and mind in Christ Jesus. Amen.