c. We must see our Christian responsibility as twofold
A Christian’s influence: salt and light
(Matthew 5:13–16)
If the beatitudes describe the essential character of the disciples of Jesus, the salt and light metaphors indicate their influence for good in the world.
Yet the very notion that Christians can exert a healthy influence in the world should bring us up with a start. What possible influence could the people described in the beatitudes exert in this hard, tough world? What lasting good can the poor and the meek do, the mourners and the merciful, and those who try to make peace not war? Would they not simply be overwhelmed by the floodtide of evil? What can they accomplish whose only passion is an appetite for righteousness, and whose only weapon is purity of heart? Are not such people too feeble to achieve anything, especially if they are a small minority in the world?
It is evident that Jesus did not share this scepticism. Rather the reverse. The world will undoubtedly persecute the church (10–12); yet it is the church’s calling to serve this persecuting world (13–16). ‘This must be your only retaliation,’ Rudolf Stier expressed it, ‘—love and truth for hatred and lies.’ Incredible as it may sound, Jesus referred to that handful of Palestinian peasants as the salt of the earth and the light of the world, so far-reaching was their influence to be. It is also a remarkable providence of God that in this most Jewish of the four Gospels there should be such an allusion to the whole earth, to the world-wide power for good of Christ’s followers.
In order to define the nature of their influence, Jesus resorted to two domestic metaphors. Every home, however poor, used and still uses both salt and light. During his own boyhood Jesus must often have watched his mother use salt in the kitchen and light the lamps when the sun went down. Salt and light are indispensable household commodities. Several commentators quote Pliny’s dictum that nothing is more useful than ‘salt and sunshine’ (sale et sole). The need for light is obvious. Salt, on the other hand, had a variety of uses. It was both a condiment and a preservative. It seems to have been recognized from time immemorial as an essential component of human diet and as a seasoning or relish to food: ‘Can that which is tasteless be eaten without salt?’ In particular, however, in the centuries before refrigeration had been invented, it was used to keep meat wholesome and to prevent decay. Indeed it still is. H. V. Morton has described the making of ‘biltong’, the dried meat of South Africa: ‘The meat, having been cut and trimmed to the required size, is well rubbed with coarse salt … If properly cured, it will keep indefinitely.’
The basic truth which lies behind these metaphors and is common to them both is that the church and the world are distinct communities. On the one hand there is ‘the earth’; on the other there is ‘you’ who are the earth’s salt. On the one hand there is ‘the world’; on the other there is ‘you’ who are the world’s light. True, the two communities (‘they’ and ‘you’) are related to each other, but their relatedness depends on their distinctness. It is important to assert this clearly in our day in which it is theologically fashionable to blur the distinction between the church and the world, and to refer to all mankind indiscriminately as ‘the people of God’.
Further, the metaphors tell us something about both communities. The world is evidently a dark place, with little or no light of its own, since an external source of light is needed to illumine it. True, it is ‘always talking about its enlightenment’, but much of its boasted light is in reality darkness. The world also manifests a constant tendency to deteriorate. The notion is not that the world is tasteless and that Christians can make it less insipid (‘The thought of making the world palatable to God is quite impossible’), but that it is putrefying. It cannot stop itself from going bad. Only salt introduced from outside can do this. The church, on the other hand, is set in the world with a double role, as salt to arrest—or at least to hinder—the process of social decay, and as light to dispel the darkness.
When we look at the two metaphors more closely, we see that they are deliberately phrased in order to be parallel to each other. In each case Jesus first makes an affirmation (‘You are the salt of the earth,’ ‘You are the light of the world’). Then he adds a rider, the condition on which the affirmation depends (the salt must retain its saltness, the light must be allowed to shine). Salt is good for nothing if its saltness is lost; light is good for nothing if it is concealed.
1. The salt of the earth (13)
The affirmation is straightforward: ‘You are salt to the world’ (NEB). This means that, when each community is itself and is true to itself, the world decays like rotten fish or meat, while the church can hinder its decay.
Of course God has set other restraining influences in the community. He has himself established certain institutions in his common grace, which curb man’s selfish tendencies and prevent society from slipping into anarchy. Chief among these are the state (with its authority to frame and enforce laws) and the home (including marriage and family life). These exert a wholesome influence in the community. Nevertheless, God intends the most powerful of all restraints within sinful society to be his own redeemed, regenerate and righteous people. As R. V. G. Tasker puts it, the disciples are ‘to be a moral disinfectant in a world where moral standards are low, constantly changing, or non-existent’.
The effectiveness of salt, however, is conditional: it must retain its saltness. Now, strictly speaking, salt can never lose its saltness. I am given to understand that sodium chloride is a very stable chemical compound, which is resistant to nearly every attack. Nevertheless, it can become contaminated by mixture with impurities, and then it becomes useless, even dangerous. Desalted salt is unfit even for manure, i.e. the compost heap. Dr David Turk has suggested to me that what was then popularly called ‘salt’ was in fact a white powder (perhaps from around the Dead Sea) which, while containing sodium chloride, also contained much else, since, in those days, there were no refineries. Of this dust the sodium chloride was probably the most soluble component and so the most easily washed out. The residue of white powder still looked like salt, and was doubtless still called salt, but it neither tasted nor acted like salt. It was just road dust.
So too a Christian. ‘Have salt in yourselves,’ Jesus said on another occasion. Christian saltiness is Christian character as depicted in the beatitudes, committed Christian discipleship exemplified in both deed and word. For effectiveness the Christian must retain his Christlikeness, as salt must retain its saltness. If Christians become assimilated to non-Christians and contaminated by the impurities of the world, they lose their influence. The influence of Christians in and on society depends on their being distinct, not identical. Dr Lloyd-Jones emphasizes this: ‘The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first.’ Otherwise, if we Christians are indistinguishable from non-Christians, we are useless. We might as well be discarded like saltless salt, ‘thrown out and trodden under foot by men’. ‘But what a downcome,’ comments A. B. Bruce, ‘from being saviours of society to supplying materials for footpaths!’
2. The light of the world (14–16)
Jesus introduces his second metaphor with a similar affirmation: you are the light of the world. True, he was later to say, ‘I am the light of the world.’ But by derivation we are too, shining with the light of Christ, shining in the world like stars in the night sky. I sometimes think how splendid it would be if non-Christians, curious to discover the secret and source of our light, were to come up to us and enquire:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
What this light is Jesus clarifies as our ‘good works’. Let men once see your good works, he said, and they will give glory to your Father who is in heaven, for it is by such good works that our light is to shine. It seems that ‘good works’ is a general expression to cover everything a Christian says and does because he is a Christian, every outward and visible manifestation of his Christian faith. Since light is a common biblical symbol of truth, a Christian’s shining light must surely include his spoken testimony. Thus, the Old Testament prophecy that God’s Servant would be ‘a light to the nations’ is said to have been fulfilled not only in Christ himself, the light of the world, but also by Christians who bear witness to Christ. Evangelism must be counted as one of the ‘good works’ by which our light shines and our Father is glorified.
Luther was right to emphasize this but wrong (I think) to make it the exclusive reference. ‘Matthew does not have in mind the ordinary works that people should do for one another out of love … Rather he is thinking principally about the distinctly Christian work of teaching correctly, of stressing faith, and of showing how to strengthen and preserve it; this is how we testify that we really are Christians.’ He went on in his commentary to draw a distinction between the first and second tables of the decalogue, that is, the ten commandments expressing our duty to God and to our neighbour. ‘The works we are talking about now deal with the first three great commandments, which pertain to God’s honour, name and Word.’ It is healthy to be reminded that believing, confessing and teaching the truth are also ‘good works’ which give evidence of our regeneration by the Holy Spirit. We must not limit them to these, however. ‘Good works’ are works of love as well as of faith. They express not only our loyalty to God, but our care for our fellows as well. Indeed, the primary meaning of ‘works’ must be practical, visible deeds of compassion. It is when people see these, Jesus said, that they will glorify God, for they embody the good news of his love which we proclaim. Without them our gospel loses its credibility and our God his honour.
As with the salt, so with the light, the affirmation is followed by a condition: Let your light … shine before men. If salt can lose its saltness, the light in us can become darkness. But we are to allow the light of Christ within us to shine out from us, so that people may see it. We are not to be like a town or village nestling in a valley whose lights are concealed from view, but like a city set on a hill which cannot be hid and whose lights are clearly seen for miles around. Again, we are to be like a lighted lamp, ‘a burning and shining lamp’ as John the Baptist was, which is set on a lampstand in a prominent position in the house so that it gives light to all in the house, and is not stuck ‘under the meal-tub’ (NEB) or ‘under a bucket’ (JBP), where it can do no good.
That is, as the disciples of Jesus, we are not to conceal the truth we know or the truth of what we are. We are not to pretend to be other than we are, but be willing for our Christianity to be visible to all. ‘Flight into the invisible is a denial of the call. A community of Jesus which seeks to hide itself has ceased to follow him.’ Rather are we to be ourselves, our true Christian selves, openly living the life described in the beatitudes, and not ashamed of Christ. Then people will see us and our good works, and seeing us will glorify God. For they will inevitably recognize that it is by the grace of God we are what we are, that our light is his light, and that our works are his works done in us and through us. So it is the light they will praise, not the lamp which bears it; it is our Father in heaven whom they will glorify, not the children he has begotten and who exhibit a certain family likeness. Even those who revile us may not be able to help glorifying God for the very righteousness on account of which they persecute us (10–12).
3. Lessons to learn
The salt and light metaphors which Jesus used have much to teach us about our Christian responsibilities in the world. Three lessons are prominent.
a. There is a fundamental difference between Christians and non-Christians, between the church and the world
True, some non-Christians adopt a deceptive veneer of Christian culture. Some professing Christians, on the other hand, seem indistinguishable from non-Christians and so deny their Christian name by their non-Christian behaviour. Yet the essential difference remains. We might say that they are as different as chalk from cheese. Jesus said they are as different as light from darkness, as different as salt from decay and disease. We serve neither God, nor ourselves, nor the world by attempting to obliterate or even minimize this difference.
This theme is basic to the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon is built on the assumption that Christians are different, and it issues a call to us to be different. Probably the greatest tragedy of the church throughout its long and chequered history has been its constant tendency to conform to the prevailing culture instead of developing a Christian counter-culture.
b. We must accept the responsibility which this distinction puts upon us
It is when in each metaphor we bring the affirmation and the condition together that our responsibility stands out. Each affirmation begins in the Greek sentence with the emphatic pronoun ‘you’, as much as to say ‘you and only you’ are the earth’s salt and the world’s light. And therefore—the condition follows with inexorable logic—you simply must not fail the world you are called to serve. You must be what you are. You are salt, and so you must retain your saltness and not lose your Christian tang. You are light, and so you must let your light shine and not conceal it in any way, whether by sin or by compromise, by laziness or by fear.
This call to assume our Christian responsibility, because of what God has made us and where he has put us, is particularly relevant to young people who feel frustrated in the modern world. The problems of the human community are so great, and they feel so small, so feeble, so ineffective. ‘Alienation’—a term popularized by Marx—is the word commonly used today to describe these frustration feelings.
What message do we have, then, for such people who feel themselves strangled by ‘the system’, crushed by the machine of modern technocracy, overwhelmed by political, social and economic forces which control them and over which they have no control? They feel themselves victims of a situation they are powerless to change. What can they do? It is in the soil of this frustration that revolutionaries are being bred, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the system. It is from the very same soil that revolutionaries of Jesus can arise, equally dedicated activists—even more so—but committed rather to spread his revolution of love, joy and peace. And this peaceful revolution is more radical than any programme of violence, both because its standards are incorruptible and because it changes people as well as structures. Have we lost our confidence in the power of the gospel of Christ? Then listen to Luther: ‘With his single word I can be more defiant and boastful than they with all their power, swords and guns.’
So we are not helpless and powerless after all! For we have Jesus Christ, his gospel, ideals and power, and Jesus Christ is all the salt and light this dark and rotten world needs. But we must have salt in ourselves, and we must let our light shine.
c. We must see our Christian responsibility as twofold
‘Salt and light have one thing in common: they give and expend themselves—and thus are the opposite of any and every kind of self-centred religiosity.’
Nevertheless, the kind of service each renders is different. In fact, their effects are complementary. The function of salt is largely negative: it prevents decay. The function of light is positive: it illumines the darkness.
So Jesus calls his disciples to exert a double influence on the secular community, a negative influence by arresting its decay and a positive influence by bringing light into its darkness. For it is one thing to stop the spread of evil; it is another to promote the spread of truth, beauty and goodness.
Putting the two metaphors together, it seems legitimate to discern in them the proper relation between evangelism and social action in the total mission of Christ in the world—a relation which perplexes many believers today. We are called to be both salt and light to the secular community.
Take first our vocation to be salt. The apostle Paul paints a grim picture at the end of the first chapter of his Roman letter of what happens when society suppresses (out of love for evil) the truth it knows by nature. It deteriorates. Its values and standards steadily decline until it becomes utterly corrupt. When men reject what they know of God, God gives them up to their own distorted notions and perverted passions, until society stinks in the nostrils of God and of all good people.
Now Christians are set in secular society by God to hinder this process. God intends us to penetrate the world. Christian salt has no business to remain snugly in elegant little ecclesiastical salt cellars; our place is to be rubbed into the secular community, as salt is rubbed into meat, to stop it going bad. And when society does go bad, we Christians tend to throw up our hands in pious horror and reproach the non-Christian world; but should we not rather reproach ourselves? One can hardly blame unsalted meat for going bad. It cannot do anything else. The real question to ask is: where is the salt?
Jesus was teaching somewhere near the sea of Galilee. Less than a hundred miles to the south the River Jordan flows into another sea, the Salt Sea, so salty that it is dead. And on its western side there lived at that time a Dead Sea Community, whose library of scrolls caused such a sensation when it was accidentally discovered a few years ago. They were a monastic community of Essenes who had withdrawn from the wicked world. They called themselves ‘the sons of light’, but they took no steps to let their light shine, and in their ghetto their salt was as useless as the deposits on the shores of the nearby sea. Is it possible that Jesus was thinking of them? W. D. Davies thinks he made ‘a side-glance’ in their direction. It is an attractive conjecture.
What does it mean in practice to be the salt of the earth? To begin with, we Christian people should be more courageous, more outspoken in condemning evil. Condemnation is negative, to be sure, but the action of salt is negative. Sometimes standards slip and slide in a community for want of a clear Christian protest. Luther makes much of this, emphasizing that denunciation and proclamation go hand in hand when the gospel is truly preached: ‘Salting has to bite. Although they criticize us as biters, we know that this is how it has to be and that Christ has commanded the salt to be sharp and continually caustic … If you want to preach the Gospel and help people, you must be sharp and rub salt into their wounds, showing the reverse side and denouncing what is not right.… The real salt is the true exposition of Scripture, which denounces the whole world and lets nothing stand but the simple faith in Christ.’
Helmut Thielicke takes up this same theme of the necessarily sharp or ‘biting’ quality of true Christian witness. To look at some Christians, he says, ‘one would think that their ambition is to be the honeypot of the world. They sweeten and sugar the bitterness of life with an all too easy conception of a loving God … But Jesus, of course, did not say, “You are the honey of the world.” He said, “You are the salt of the earth.” Salt bites, and the unadulterated message of the judgment and grace of God has always been a biting thing.’
And alongside this condemnation of what is false and evil, we should take our stand boldly for what is true, good and decent whether in our neighbourhood, in our college, profession or business, or in the wider sphere of national life, including the mass media.
Christian salt takes effect by deeds as well as words. We have already seen that God has created both the state and the family as social structures to restrain evil and encourage goodness. And Christians have a responsibility to see that these structures are not only preserved but are also operated with justice. Too often evangelical Christians have interpreted their social responsibility in terms only of helping the casualties of a sick society, and have done nothing to change the structures which cause the casualties. Just as doctors are concerned not only with the treatment of patients but also with preventive medicine and public health, so we should concern ourselves with what might be called preventive social medicine and higher standards of moral hygiene. However small our part may be, we cannot opt out of seeking to create better social structures, which guarantee justice in legislation and law enforcement, the freedom and dignity of the individual, civil rights for minorities and the abolition of social and racial discrimination. We should neither despise these things nor avoid our responsibility for them. They are part of God’s purpose for his people. Whenever Christians are conscientious citizens, they are acting like salt in the community. As Sir Frederick Catherwood put it in his contribution to the symposium Is revolution change? ‘To try to improve society is not worldliness but love. To wash your hands of society is not love but worldliness.’
But fallen human beings need more than barricades to stop them becoming as bad as they could be. They need regeneration, new life through the gospel. Hence our second vocation to be ‘the light of the world’. For the truth of the gospel is the light, contained indeed in fragile earthenware lamps, yet shining through our very earthenness with the more conspicuous brightness. We are called both to spread the gospel and to frame our manner of life in a way that is worthy of the gospel.
So then, we should never put our two vocations to be salt and light, our Christian social and evangelistic responsibilities, over against each other as if we had to choose between them. We should not exaggerate either, nor disparage either, at the expense of the other. Neither can be a substitute for the other. The world needs both. It is bad and needs salt; it is dark and needs light. Our Christian vocation is to be both. Jesus Christ said so, and that should be enough.
In the United States one of the ministries which has been described as being on the edge of the so-called ‘Jesus movement’ is known as the ‘Jesus Christ Light and Power House’. It is a Christian commune in Westwood, administered by Hal Lindsey and Bill Counts, who give biblical teaching to the residents. ‘Light and power’ are a fine combination, and both are to be found in Jesus Christ. But when will somebody in America establish a ‘Jesus Christ Salt and Light Company Inc.’?
In the United Kingdom there has arisen in recent years an almost spontaneous movement known as the ‘Festival of Light’. I thank God for the courageous and exuberant witness of the young people (as they mostly are) who belong to it. It seeks to combine a protest against pornography and a campaign for the moral law of God in public life with a clear testimony to Jesus Christ. Perhaps it should become even more self-consciously a ‘Festival of Salt and Light’.
At all events, we must not be shy of our vocation to be salt as well as light, or we shall be guilty of separating what Jesus has united.
A Christian’s character as described in the beatitudes and a Christian’s influence as defined in the salt and light metaphors are organically related to one another. Our influence depends on our character. But the beatitudes set an extremely high and exacting standard. It may be helpful, therefore, as a conclusion to this chapter, to look back over both paragraphs and note the incentives to righteousness which Jesus gives.
First, this is the way we ourselves will be blessed. The beatitudes identify those whom God declares to be ‘blessed’, those who please him and who themselves find fulfilment. True blessedness is found in goodness, and nowhere else.
Secondly, this is the way the world will best be served. Jesus offers his followers the immense privileges of being the world’s salt and light if only they will live by the beatitudes.
Thirdly, this is the way God will be glorified. Here towards the beginning of his ministry Jesus tells his disciples that if they let their light shine so that their good works are seen, their Father in heaven will be glorified. At the end of his ministry, in the upper room, he will express the same truth in similar words: ‘By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples.’
This, then, is the great desirability of the good and Christlike life, and so of the Christian counter-culture. It brings blessing to ourselves, salvation to others and ultimately glory to God.