You Are Salt and Light

Matthew 5:13-20

13 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.

14 “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 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. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.

17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

You Are Salt and Light

I’ve gotten into the habit of making eggs for breakfast recently. What kinds of things do you put in your eggs? For me, it largely depends on what we have on hand. If we have bell peppers or onions I might dice them up. If it’s after Christmas and we have some leftover ham, you better believe there will be a pork product in there. Whatever cheese we have on hand – that just goes without saying. Then, to top it off, no matter what time of year it is, no matter what else I put in those eggs, I’ll reach into the cupboard and grab some salt.

Salt just makes everything taste better. And the best thing about salt is that you don’t have to check the expiration date, because salt doesn’t expire. You don’t have to squeeze it, sniff it, sample it to see if it is still good. Salt is salt is salt. It is reliable. You always know what you’re getting. So at any time of day, no matter how long it’s been in the cupboard, no matter what I’m making, I can grab some salt and count on it to do what salt does. I don’t have to give salt a pep talk before I use it, “Now go and be salty!” It just is, by its very nature.

You are salt. That’s what Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount. We started studying this sermon last week. We’ll keep talking about it next week too. It’s the most famous sermon ever preached. It goes on for three chapters of Matthew’s Gospel and tells us so many things. Most of all, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is highly practical. Over and over again in this sermon Jesus tells us what a Christian is supposed to do.

Today’s portion of Jesus’ sermon is different, though, isn’t it? Jesus isn’t telling you what to do. He is telling you what you are. Jesus didn’t tell his disciples, “Now listen up. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go and be your saltiest self.” No, he said,

“You are the salt of the earth.”[1]

Over the centuries, Christians have debated what that means exactly. Since salt acts as a preservative, are we supposed to help preserve the world from the potential evils that could take place here? Since salt makes things taste better, are we supposed to spice up life with our own unique Christian flavour? I think that there is an element of both. But the way that Jesus himself explains this seven-word sentence leads me to believe that he isn’t talking about preservatives or spiciness. He’s talking about distinctiveness and consistency.

You can tell when there is salt in your eggs at breakfast. The world can tell when a Christian walks into the room.

Have you ever heard the expression that you are the only Bible that some people will ever read? It’s so true, especially where we live. I mentioned it a couple weeks ago – only 13% of Canadians go to church regularly. That means that 87% do not. That leaves a huge segment of your world that either doesn’t know Jesus at all – has never cracked open a Bible – or, at the very least, doesn’t know Jesus very well. You are the only Bible that many people in your life will ever read.

When you go to work, your coworkers are watching you. When you go to school, your classmates are listening. When you have a playdate or a birthday party with your family or friends, they’re paying attention. They are listening to the kinds of things you say and the way you say them. They notice if you’re nice or nasty to other people. They see you when you open the door for someone else or when you close your mouth instead of joining them in gossip or gutter talk.

They’re watching and they’re listening, but more importantly they are forming their impressions about Jesus and Christianity based on what they see and hear from you.

So what happens when you don’t bring a distinctive Christian flavour to your workplace or school? What happens when you slap a fish decal on the back bumper of your car and then drive like a self-obsessed maniac? What happens when you pick and choose the moments that you want to act or talk like a Christian, as if it’s OK for you to be good and prim and proper here, but as soon as you get to your friend’s house or to the restaurant or arena you “let your hair down” and let profanities spew out of the same mouth that sang God’s praises here?

Jesus tells us:

“But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to thrown out and be trampled underfoot.”[2]

A Christian who doesn’t act like a Christian is of no use to anyone. If you are inconsistent, insincere, or indifferent in your faith you’re not helping anybody else. In fact, you’re hurting other people because you’re giving them a false impression about Jesus. You are making it seem as if God doesn’t care about what people do. Or you are casting Jesus and his name in such a negative light that no one would want anything to do with him.

A Christian who doesn’t act like a Christian is of no use to anyone. If you are inconsistent, insincere, or indifferent in your faith, you’re not helping yourself either. Jesus says that you are not good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. Your faith is dead and so is your hope of a future in heaven with him. That was the last verse of our text for today:

“For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”[3]

Is that intimidating to you – to know that you are the best, or maybe even the only, chance that some of the people you know and love will ever have to go to heaven? To know that you have to be “on” all the time because the world is watching you? It’s not just pastors who live in glass houses. Christian, the world is watching you. And so is your God, and heaven hangs in the balance, both for you and the people who are reading you.

Goodness, when you put it that way, I don’t know that I want to be salt or light to the world. Can I just retreat, withdraw, hole up in my house with my family and mind our own business? Can we just create a little Christian colony somewhere where we don’t have to worry about what other people see or hear or say? Well, no. That wouldn’t work either, because even there our righteousness would not surpass that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law. Heaven would still be barred to us.

But even more than that, Christian isolation is not possible, because that’s not God’s purpose for you. God didn’t tell you to be salty. He said, “You are salt.” God didn’t say, “Let your light shine before others so that they can see how great you are and how far your righteousness surpasses anyone else’s.” He said,

“You are the light of the world… Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”[4]

Sometimes when we hear sermons like this one, we bristle, we resist, we reject what we hear. We don’t want it to be true. I don’t want to be the only Bible that the people in my life will ever read. I know I can never live up to that. When I hear the to-do list of God’s holy law and the perfect standard that he sets for my obedience, I have no love in my heart for the commands of God. And yet, that law is still good.

Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets” – but Jesus, wouldn’t that make my life so much easier?!? – “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”[5] Now that actually does make my life so much easier.

Sometimes God’s commands and his perfect standard for our unrighteous seem so unattainable that it feels unfair and downright cruel for God to hold them over us. But God’s law is good. It was given for our good. When he tells us not to murder, cheat, or steal, he is protecting life and marriages and property. When he tells us not to lie or covet or show disrespect, he is protecting the truth and your satisfaction and your relationships. The fact that we cannot keep the law doesn’t make the law bad; it makes us bad.

In fact, the law is so good that if someone were able to keep it perfectly, he would get to go to heaven purely on the merits of his own goodness. Keeping the law is and has always has been a legitimate way to get to heaven. It’s just that no one has ever been able to live up to it – no one, of course, except Jesus.

Jesus did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them. Talk about being the only Bible some people will ever read; he was the Word of God in the flesh. When people looked at him, they saw what God expects of you. When people listened to him, they did not hear hypocrisy or hatred or one more guy up on his high horse; they heard the truth and the love of God – that God hates sin and punishes it, but has forgiven you through his Son, i.e. his perfect, sinless, spotless Son who sacrificed himself in your place on a cross, who paid for your sin with his life, who opened heaven to you and countless others whose righteousness does not surpass that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, but whose hope is in him and his righteousness. He is the one who made you into the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

It can be scary to think that God wants your Christian faith and life to be as distinctive and consistent as salt is in scrambled eggs. It can be scary to think that God wants your Christian faith and life to be as obvious and visible as a city on a hill. But that is the grace and mercy of our God, that he took the weak things of this world, the small things, the unimportant things to shine a light on the most important thing. It is nothing but pure grace that Jesus calls you the light of the world, not because you are so bright and brilliant, but because like a mirror or the moon, even imperfectly you can nevertheless reflect the light of Christ to this sin-darkened world. Even though you fail and fumble in your faith, you can still embody the forgiveness of Jesus to you and then also through you to the world.

I thank God that Jesus’ command to you is not, “Be salty,” or “Be bright and brilliant.” It is his promise and a miracle of his grace that says, “You are salt; you are light.” That is what God has made you. The goal is not to be saltier or brighter. It is to be what God has made you distinctively and consistently and visibly. The goal is not to hide our light under a bushel or let our flavour taste like the world around us. It is not even to let other people see our good deeds so that they know how good we are, but so that they can know how good Jesus is.

You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. May God work in you and through you to know God’s love and to show God’s love to the world in Christ Jesus our Lord. To him be all glory and honor and praise forever and ever. Amen.

[1] Matthew 5:13

[2] Matthew 5:13

[3] Matthew 5:20

[4] Matthew 5:14,16

[5] Matthew 5:17

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Look, the Lamb of God!

John 1:29-41

29 The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! 30 This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ 31 I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.”

32 Then John gave this testimony: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. 33 And I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ 34 I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One.”

35 The next day John was there again with two of his disciples. 36 When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God!”

37 When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. 38 Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?”

They said, “Rabbi” (which means “Teacher”), “where are you staying?”

39 “Come,” he replied, “and you will see.”

So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him. It was about four in the afternoon.

40 Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus. 41 The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah” (that is, the Christ).

Look, the Lamb of God!

What do you do when you see something really cool? “Hey Don, did you see McDavid’s goal last night? You have to check out this replay.” “Oh man, look at that moose. It’s majestic.” Or, if you are my 2-year-old son and you see one of the 300 school buses that drives by every day, you go, “Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.”

When we see something amazing, we want to share that experience with the people we love. John the Baptist saw something amazing in our Gospel reading today: The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said,

“Look the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”[1]

That one sentence is a sermon in itself. There is so much in those 24 words both for us to marvel at, and for us to share with the people we love.

I think the first thing that stands out to me is who it was whom John saw. It was Jesus. For the first 30 years of his life, Jesus certainly would have stood out as a very nice man, e.g. reliable, trustworthy, kind, humble, generous, etc…, but that’s about it. No one would have looked at Jesus and said, “Surely you are God in the flesh.”

But when Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove – apparently just as God told John he would – and then, if there were still any doubts, the heavens opened above them and a voice spoke from the clouds, announcing, “This is my Son who I love, with him I am well pleased.”

God revealed Jesus to John and to the rest of the eyewitnesses on the banks of the Jordan River as the long-promised Saviour of the World. Without that revelation, people may have thought that Jesus was a good guy, but not much more than that. But because of that revelation, John could see Jesus walking his way and say,

“Look the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”[2]

It may seem like a simple and obvious statement that you’d expect to hear in a Christian church that Jesus is the Son of God and the promised Saviour of the world. But whether you’ve that truth once or a thousand times, it’s still worth hearing again because it reminds us who Jesus really is and clarifies why we come to worship him.

Jesus was not just a nice guy whose example we have decided we want to follow, like Gandhi or Mother Theresa. Our congregation does not exist to feed the hungry, clothe the cold, or comfort the lonely. We may and should do those things, but they are not our purpose or our reason for gathering together every week.

Similarly, Jesus is not just a great teacher whose instruction we want to learn so that we can be wiser, so that we can have answers to life’s greatest questions. We don’t come to church to become philosophers. We don’t come to church to make sense of the world, or to find our place in it.

That’s why Jesus’ question to Andrew and John is so perfect. When two of John the Baptist’s disciples decided to follow Jesus, he asked them, “What do you want?”[3] Not, “Who are you looking for?” but, “What do you want?”

Unfortunately, we follow Jesus for all the wrong reasons. I’ve hit rock bottom and I don’t know where else to go. I’m sick or dying, and now I’m afraid. I’m looking for someone, something, anything to solve my problem. I’m lonely and looking for my people. I cherish the values I learned as a child and want to keep being a good person.

Now, don’t get me wrong, whatever it is that caused you to come to church, to look at Jesus with curiosity or hope, even for a second, is a tool in God’s hands to bring you to where you really need to be. And your God does care about whatever it is your going through, whatever problem you can’t solve, whatever anxiety you can’t calm. But when John saw Jesus, he didn’t say, “Look, here comes your Problem Solver; here comes your Mentor; here comes your Medicine Man.” He said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”[4] That’s what John was excited to see and share.

This world does need people to take compassion on each other. This world does need believers who buy in to what the Bible teaches. In short, this world needs Christians acting like Christians. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? We don’t always act like Christians.

We don’t always answer the call to help people in need, even when that call comes to our doorstep, much less when we have to go looking for people in need. We don’t always look for the wisdom of God from his Word. Instead, to make sense of the world we live in, we turn to popular psychology; to learn how to be a better parent we look for hacks on TikTok. Sometimes, we even come to church or read God’s Word or turn to him in prayer not because of who he is, but because of what we think we can get from him.

If there are elements of your life that feel messed up, they are only a symptom of the sin that lives in each of us, i.e. the sin that makes us selfish, the sin that indulges in harmful craving without caring about the consequence, the sin that ruins relationships, that separates us from our God, that even makes our coming to church all about me and what I can get from God rather than a celebration of who my God is.

But that’s why John was so excited, because when he looked at Jesus, he saw the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

When God organized the Jewish religion, he gave his people a symbol of their salvation – the sacrifice of innocent animals. Those animals hadn’t done anything wrong. In fact, God demanded that only the best lambs, without blemish or defect, were to be used for sacrifice. The people would lay their hands on those animals, symbolically passing their sin and guilt from themselves to the lambs, and then slaughter them on the altar of God to pay for their sins with that animal’s blood. Blood, death is the only thing that can pay for sin.

But all those animals for all those years were just symbols of salvation. They were all pointing ahead to the true Lamb of God who would take all our sin away.

I said before that to look at Jesus you would have seen a really nice guy – reliable, trustworthy, kind, humble, generous, etc… Well, that would be an understatement. He was perfect in every way. He always cared for other people. He always kept his priorities straight. He always did everything that a good person does, and he did it all for the right reasons – not for show or to get something from someone, but from sincere love for others and for his Father in heaven.

Another way you could say that is that Jesus was pure and spotless, a Lamb without blemish or defect. He was perfect in every way, which perfectly qualified him to be the perfect sacrifice for our sin. When Jesus went to the cross, it was as if each of us laid our sins on him, unburdened ourselves of our guilt and received the peace of his forgiveness. He took all our sins away. He paid for them with his holy, precious blood. He removed all our guilt from us forever when he died on that tree.

And yet that’s not exactly what John says here, is it? John doesn’t say, “Look, the Lamb of God who will take away the sin of the world,” or, “who did take away the sin of the world.” He says, “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” i.e. “who is taking… who keeps taking… who continually takes your sin away.”

That’s the comfort you have knowing that Jesus is the Lamb of God. No matter how many sins you commit, no matter how many times you fail in your calling as a father or mother, a neighbour or a friend, no matter how many times you fall back into that same sin you just can’t shake, Jesus takes that sin away too. He is your never-ending, all-sufficient Lamb of salvation who takes every one of your sins away.

That’s why we come to church week after week. It’s not to become better people. It’s not to serve our community. It’s not even to become Bible scholars. It’s to be forgiven, to live in the grace of our God that sent his Son to be the Lamb of sacrifice to take all our sin away. We come here to hear those glorious words at the start of almost every service:

God, our merciful Father, has forgiven all our sins. He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to be our Redeemer and Savior. Jesus paid the penalty for our guilt by his death on the cross and freed us from death by his resurrection from the grave. We have peace with God now and forever.

It’s little wonder, then, that John the Baptist got excited when he saw Jesus. “Ooh, ooh, ooh! Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” It’s little wonder that the Apostles John and Andrew went and found their brothers James and Peter and said,

“We have found the Messiah!”[5]

That’s the joy and excitement we have every time we hear God’s Word, and that’s the opportunity you have everyday to say to someone you love, “Look, I can’t cure your disease or addiction; I can’t solve your problem, but I can point you to the one who supplies your greatest need. Look, the Lamb of God who takes your sin away. Let me show you Jesus, not for what earthly benefits he may offer, but for who he is, your loving Saviour, who shoulders your every sin, who bears your every burden, who frees you from guilt and shame and who gives you the hope of heaven. Look, the Lamb of God, who takes all your sin away!” Amen.

[1] John 1:29

[2] John 1:29

[3] John 1:36

[4] John 1:29

[5] John 1:41

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