Mathew 5:13-16

You Are the Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World

Brad Hodges

7/20/25

Salt and Light
Matthew 5:13–16 – Living in the Kingdom: Sermons in Matthew 5–7 – Brad Hodges – July 20, 2025

Introduction

In October of the year 1066, William, the Duke of Normandy (known to history as William the Conqueror) sailed with his army across the English channel from what is now France and landed with his men on the southern coast of England. Two weeks later, William and his troops fought and defeated the english army at the famous Battle of Hastings. They killed the English king, Harold Godwinson, there on the battlefield. William then marched to London, and on Christmas day in 1066 he was crowned in Westminster Abbey as the new King of England. It was one of those few moments in history that changed absolutely everything. It changed the entire course of english civilization. William was essentially a french viking. I can’t imagine a creature more shocking to an Englishman than a french viking. To suddenly have him as their king turned everything upside down.

But when William became king, the people of England didn’t immediately start speaking French and shaping their lives according to the will of King William. Lots of people rejected him. Lots of others didn’t even know that he was the king. Changes took time, and they happened organically. After William’s victory, he did what you would expect. He brought thousands of Normans with him to live in England. Over time their lives mixed, and life in England gradually started to change. The language changed, customs changed. Things that we think of as quintessentially english - things like knights and castles - were actually things that the Normans brought to England. It was a shock when William came, but the way that life changed in England was by Normans living like Normans among the English. On Christmas Day of 1066, the kingdom of William of Normandy had come, but it took a long time to establish his kingdom in England. And while he was crowned as king through an act of violence, his kingdom was established by means of the Norman people just living like Normans out in the English world.

The message of Matthew’s gospel, and of the whole New Testament, is that Jesus Christ is king, and that his kingdom has come on earth. Jesus said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” We are all living under the reign of King Jesus. And yet there is more that needs to happen. He told his disciples to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” So the kingdom is here, and yet we’re to pray for it to come. That can sometimes be confusing, but the William analogy helps us see how that could be the case. It’s a fact of reality that Jesus is the king, and he reigns over everything. There is nothing outside of his dominion. He is “the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords,” it says in 1 Timothy. But in an equally important sense the kingdom is still coming. The kingdom of God is not like the 82nd airborne, dropping in from the sky. Jesus said that it’s like a mustard seed. It starts very small, and it grows. The question that we’re considering this morning is, “How does the kingdom grow? What’s the mechanism? Jesus’s answer is that it doesn’t happen through force of arms. It happens through the people of God acting like the people of God out in the world. That’s how the kingdom grows. Remember that our sermon series is called “Living in the Kingdom.” The sermon on the mount is a description of life in the kingdom of God. This is how God’s people behave. As God’s people behave this way, the result is that the kingdom expands and more people are brought into the blessing of living in the kingdom. Said another way, the church is God’s plan for the salvation of the world. And the church’s marching orders are simply this - to be more like Jesus, in community with one another, and out in the world for everyone to see.

We’re focusing on verses thirteen through sixteen this morning. Remember that Jesus is on the mountain with a large crowd gathered around. His disciples have come to him and are presumably gathered close by him, maybe sitting at his feet. Then he begins to teach them, describing for them what life is like in the kingdom of God. Who are the blessed ones in God’s kingdom? It’s not the rich and powerful, as some might expect. He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” Then his tone changes slightly and he speaks more directly, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter evil against you falsely on my account.” And then Jesus, still speaking directly, gives us this famous metaphor. “You are the salt of the earth.” “You are the light of the world.” Remember that Jesus is speaking to his disciples - people who have bowed to him as king and have God as their Father. That’s you, church. And we’ll get a hint in these verses that it’s you as the church - the community of God’s people - that he has in mind. So Jesus is talking to you individually, but as a member of the church, the people of God. As is so often the case in the Bible, Jesus has something to say to us about who we are and also how we should act. As we’ve discussed many times before, who you are and what you do are inseparable. What you do flows from who you are. The tone that instruction almost always takes in the Bible is “This is who you are, now go and act like it.” That’s the pattern here as well. 

But Jesus challenges us in these verses. Jesus is the consummate teacher. He tells us something about ourselves, but he does it in a way that makes us think. He doesn’t give us a prosaic description of ourselves. Instead he uses these two poetic metaphors. “You are the salt of the earth.” “You are the light of the world.” This is one of those cases where we’ve heard the words a thousand times, but I suspect that many of us would struggle to articulate exactly what it means that we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. But here’s something that might surprise you - I don’t actually think that Jesus intended for us to be able to articulate exactly what it means. Jesus is teaching us something, for sure. But in these metaphors he’s communicating the way a poet does. These images function like poetry, and poetry frustrates our desire for easy explanations. It invites us to think creatively about meaning. And in poetry (at least in good poetry) there is always more than one layer of meaning. When you take a good poetic image and you nail it down on all four corners and say, “I’ve got it, this is exactly what it means,” there’s a good chance that you’ve killed it. We don’t want to do that. The Bible is full of poetry and metaphors. This kind of meaning is a gift from God and reflects something of what God is like. So we want to embrace the opportunity to learn from these metaphors in the way that God intended. That requires that we loosen our grip a little bit and think imaginatively about what our Lord meant when he said that we are salt and light.

Now obviously you have to be careful when you approach the Bible this way. It can’t be the case that this means whatever we want it to mean, or that its meaning can’t be known. That would be wrong. There are two things that are going to help us avoid going off the rails. The first is that, as always, we’re going to let the Bible guide our thinking. Any time you encounter an image like this in the Bible, the first thing you want to do is find out how it is used other places in the Bible. That’s a very important rule for reading your Bible. The Bible is a single, coherent book, and how an image is used in one place in the Bible informs how we interpret that image in other places. God is the author of the whole Bible, and he determines what these symbols mean. We should expect there to be a coherence to the symbolism in the Bible since it all comes, ultimately, from the same author. But also, remember that the human authors were very familiar with the scriptures and symbolism that came before them. Jesus knew his Old Testament very well. And later New Testament writers also knew their Old Testament, and they knew the teachings of Jesus. That’s important to remember.

The other thing that we’re going to do to avoid going off course is to follow Jesus where he’s leading us. As I said, he is the consummate teacher, and at the end of this little section he clearly tells us what our main takeaway should be. His conclusion is that we should behave in such a way that more people give glory to God and the kingdom of God grows on earth. “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” That’s Jesus’s lesson summary, so everything that we say about salt and light needs to point us in that direction. If it doesn’t, then we’ll know that we’ve gone off course. That said, let’s think about these two images, salt and light.

I. Salt

“You are the salt of the earth.” Salt is one of those substances, like water and air, that is remarkable because it is so common, and so important. We aren’t used to thinking of salt as being like water and air, but it absolutely was to Jesus’s disciples on that hill. I confess that I wasn’t aware of just how big a deal salt was before I started thinking and reading about this passage. I went down a rabbit trail in preparing for this, learning about the importance of salt, both practically and symbolically, throughout the history of the world. I’ll spare you all of that detail this morning, but take my word for it that salt has always been really important. There have been times in history when it was literally worth its weight in gold. Homer called it a divine substance. Plato described it as especially near to the gods. Salt is not desirable because it’s rare. It’s not rare. It can be found just about everywhere. It’s desirable because it’s so useful. Salt is, among many other things, a seasoning, a preservative, a fertilizer, a medicine, a cleaner; it’s used to make pottery, soap, leather, paper, and a hundred other things that are necessary for life - especially life in the ancient world. It’s one of the most practical substances in the world. And the Bible uses a number of these practical functions to communicate, using salt as a metaphor. Let’s look at a few of them, and think about how they might shed light on Jesus’s claim that we are the salt of the earth.

To begin with, when Jesus says to his disciples that “you are the salt of the earth,” one thing they would have heard him saying is that as ubiquitous and as important as salt is, so are my disciples in the kingdom of God. Here’s a connection to consider. If you listen for it, you can hear echoes of God’s promise to Abraham, when God told Abraham that his offspring would be like the sand on the seashore and that all of the nations of the earth would be blessed by them. Remember, we’re trying to think like a poet. Sand and salt are similar, earthy things. In fact, Israel’s salt was collected from the shores of the Dead Sea. Jesus might be hinting here that his disciples are the true offspring of Abraham and the fulfillment of the promise. That theology will get filled out more by the apostle Paul. This is just a hint. Abraham’s sand on the seashore has become Jesus’s salt of the earth. Just as salt covers the earth with all sorts of blessings, Jesus’s disciples will one day cover the earth with the kingdom blessing that was promised to Abraham and is fulfilled in Jesus.

That’s an idea to consider. Let’s look at some other salt imagery in the Bible and think about how that task is accomplished. The apostle Paul refers to salt in connection to our speech. Of its many uses, the one we’re most familiar with is as a seasoning. Salt is for flavoring our food. Colossians 4 says, “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.” Life in the kingdom of God requires speaking a certain way. Ephesians 4 says, “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.” So salty speech - kingdom speech - is speech that is gracious and timely, fit for the occasion. Salty speech is good for building up. It promotes growth. Salty speech isn’t mushy or precious. It should be piercing, like the word of God. Fit just right for the occasion. But it is always for building up, not tearing down. Let’s resolve to speak that way to each other. The goal is that people will see our good works and give glory to our Father in heaven. What could be more evident to the world than how we speak to one another? You are the salt of the earth. Let your speech be salty, seasoned with the gospel.

Another of salt’s properties that Jesus’s disciples would have known, but we have forgotten, is that salt is a fertilizer. In the version of the sermon that Luke records, Jesus assumes that we know that when he says that “Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Salt that has lost its saltiness is no use for the soil or the manure pile. Jesus is referring to the fact that salt, the right amounts, provides the soil with minerals that plants need to grow.

So the people of God are being pictured here as a fertilizer. Let your mind wander around with that thought as well. There are a number of places it could go. If the kingdom of God is like a seed that grows into a tree, then it is the disciples of Jesus who go out into the barren places of the world and prepare the soil for kingdom growth. The barren places are anywhere that Jesus is not worshipped as king. There are places like that in Africa, as well as Apex. Perhaps your mind also goes to the parable of the sower, where the human heart is said to be like soil, and the seed that is planted is the word of God. You can’t cause the seed of the word to take root in a person’s heart. But you can speak and act in such a way that people see your good works, and the soil of their heart might be softened by the work of the Holy Spirit.

But if salt in the right amounts is good for the soil, it’s also true that too much salt is a judgment. Psalm 107 says that the Lord turns “a fruitful land into a salty waste because of the evil of its inhabitants.” In the book of Judges, when the city of Shechem rose up against Abimelech, it says that Abimelech “captured the city and killed the people who were in it, and he razed the city and sowed it with salt.” To sow the land with salt means not to fertilize, but to salt the soil so thoroughly that nothing can grow for a very long time. There’s a sense of permanence to it. It’s as if you’re putting a thing to death and declaring that this place and its way of life is no more. We don’t talk about it as much, but the growth of the kingdom of God brings this kind of judgment with it. Entering into the kingdom requires an act of death before there can be a resurrection. As the kingdom grows, the old ways of sin are called to task and put to death. And the church is central in that part of kingdom growth as well. The main way it happens is through the bold proclamation of God’s word of judgement against sin. But it also happens simply by the people of God acting like Jesus out in the world. It says in Proverbs, “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you.” A simple act of kindness to your enemy is a kind of judgement on him. God is in control of how that plays out, but Jesus says that one possible outcome is that your enemy sees your good works and his conscience is pricked, and by a work of the Spirit, he gives glory to your Father in heaven.

There are lots of ways to apply this as well, but here’s one to consider. What effect do you have on sin when you come into contact with it? Does your presence tend to put sin to death, or does sin tend to get along just fine when you’re around? I’m not talking about whether there is sin lurking in your own heart. I’m asking what effect you have on the people around you. Young folks, when you find yourself in a group and someone has the idea to throw a rock through a window or to cheat on a test, what impact do you have on the situation? Does your presence tend to kill the idea? Or is your presence even noticed? You are the salt of the earth. Sin should tend to whither up and die when you’re around.

What other layers might there be? The most important practical use for salt has always been as a preservative. Amazingly, salt resists the effects of death and decay. In an age without refrigeration, that was an immensely important gift. Salt’s ability to resist death and decay meant that salt even came to symbolize life and healing. That was true in many ancient cultures, but it’s also true in the Bible. One example is an episode with the prophet Elisha in 2 Kings, chapter 2, where the men of the city of Jericho came and complained to Elisha that the water of the city was no good, and as a result the land was unfruitful. This is what Elisha did.

[Elisha] said, “Bring me a new bowl, and put salt in it.” So they brought it to him. Then he went to the spring of water and threw salt in it and said, “Thus says the Lord, I have healed this water; from now on neither death nor miscarriage shall come from it.” So the water has been healed to this day, according to the word that Elisha spoke.

Salt is a symbol of life and health and healing. So what are some ways in which the people of God, the salt of the earth, preserve life and are a source of healing for the world? There are lots of different ways you could go with that thought. Many of you encountered a powerful example on Wednesday night in the documentary that you saw. One of the first things that happened to the Wayana tribe in Suriname when missionaries brought the gospel is that they stopped killing their babies. A tribe of people who were spiritually and physically dying were preserved from death by the gospel when one brave family of Christians came and lived among them. And of course the exact same thing is what we want to see here in America. Who are the ones leading the fight to preserve the lives of the children being killed in abortion clinics? It’s the people of God. You are the salt of the earth. Whether it’s happening here or in the Amazon, the sin of killing babies will be stopped and life will be preserved through the work of the church and the spread of the gospel, or it won’t be stopped at all.

Just one more possible connection to consider. This might be the most important one. Salt points us back to God’s covenant with Israel, and to the old covenant sacrificial system. All of the sacrifices that were offered to God were to include salt. In Leviticus 2, the Israelites were told, “You shall season all your grain offerings with salt. You shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering; with all your offerings you shall offer salt.” Salt was so symbolically important to God that his covenant with this people is called a Covenant of Salt. In Numbers when God is speaking to the Levites about the duties and privileges that they are to enjoy, he says, “All the holy contributions that the people of Israel present to the Lord I give to you, and to your sons and daughters with you, as a perpetual due. It is a covenant of salt forever before the Lord for you and for your offspring with you.”

Why did God require salt to be included in every offering, and why was God’s covenant with his people called a covenant of salt? We aren’t told, exactly. It could be, playing on the fact that salt is a preservative, that salt symbolizes the fact that the covenant is unending. God’s covenant with David is also called a covenant of salt. Remember what he said to David. “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever.” So just as God’s kingdom is an everlasting kingdom that will never be destroyed, so also God’s covenant with his people is an everlasting covenant.

Another reason for salting the offerings might be simply this - the Bible describes Israel’s offering of sacrifices as sharing in a meal with God. The priests were to eat of a portion of the sacrifice, and a portion was offered to God. What was offered to God is often described as having a “pleasing aroma” to God, as if he’s simply enjoying the meal. Salt might simply be a way of symbolically flavoring God’s food, so that it will be pleasing to him. You don’t serve bland food to a guest of honor, and you don’t offer bland sacrifices to God.

Maybe that thought sends your minds wandering to Romans 12 where we’re told that the people of God are to offer themselves as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. You, church, the salt of the earth, are a pleasing offering to God. But God’s plan is that, in time, everything will offered up to him. Every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. As the disciples of Jesus go out into the world, our mission is to salt the whole earth and turn it into a pleasing sacrifice to God.

What’s your role in presenting the world as a sacrifice to God? That’s exactly the thing that we should all go home today and think about. For a few of us, it means doing something or going somewhere unexpected. God help us to be ready if that’s what he asks of us. But for most of us, our job isn’t to think big thoughts about how to save the culture or expand the kingdom. Our job is to focus on the thing in front of us. The expansion of the kingdom and the saving of the culture starts at your dinner table. Raise your kids to be well-mannered and full of salt. Salty, God-fearing kids are a blessing, and that blessing only multiplies as they grow. Step two is to invite your neighbor over for a meal. Perhaps the most effective tool that God created for salting the earth with his glory is a salted baked potato, shared with a neighbor, with your happy kids at the table - their bright eyes and cheerful smiles acting as a witness to the power of the gospel and the joy of living in the kingdom of God.

Those are just a few possible layers of meaning for you to consider. There certainly could be others. There are other references to salt in the Bible that could be worth meditating on. Jesus says in Mark 9 that “everyone will be salted with fire.” What does that mean, and how does it connect? That’s your homework assignment. Go home and open your Bible and think like a poet about what it might mean to be salted with fire. I’m interested to hear what you come up with.

Jesus says that “you are the salt of the earth.” Then he gives this sort of warning. Perhaps it’s more like a charge. He says “but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet.” Jesus is playing here on the absurdity of the idea that there could be such a thing as unsalty salt. There is no such thing. If it isn’t salty, then it isn’t salt. How can you salt the thing that is supposed to do the salting? Some folks will say that we should connect this to places like Hebrews 6, where we’re warned that it’s impossible, once someone has tasted the heavenly gift and then fallen away, to ever restore them again to repentance. That’s one possible layer of meaning, but that’s complicated, and I think it takes us away from the main point that Jesus is driving toward. Jesus is simply saying to us, “Be salty.” You are the salt of the earth, so be salty. Jesus says exactly that in the version of this message that Mark recorded. Jesus said, “Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” So be salty, in all of the ways that we’ve talked about this morning, and more. Be salty, as you grow to be more like Jesus every day, and as you live as disciples of Jesus in community with each other, out in front of the world for everyone to see. Be salty, and as you do the kingdom of God will grow.

II. Light

Let’s think, now, about Jesus’s second metaphor. “You are the light of the world.” We have a pretty good intuitive sense of what light symbolizes and what it means to be a light. This is a bit more straightforward, but it will still be useful to do the same thing that we did with salt and consider how the Bible uses light as a metaphor in other places to help us understand what Jesus meant when he said that we are the light of the world.

Again, let’s start at the beginning, with God’s promise to Abraham. As we saw, God promised that Abraham’s offspring would be like the sand on the seashore. He also said that they would be like the stars in the sky. So there’s a hint that God’s people are a kind of light. Sand and stars have become salt and light. But later, through the prophet Isaiah, God clearly said that Israel was to be a light to the nations. In Isaiah 42, God said:

I will give you as a covenant for the people,

a light for the nations,

to open the eyes that are blind,

to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,

from the prison those who sit in darkness.

Then a few chapters later, he said again, “I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” It was never God’s intention that his people would forever remain a small island of blessing in the middle of a dying world. It was always God’s plan that his kingdom would grow and spread and eventually reach to the ends of the earth. It was Israel’s charge to be the instrument of that kingdom expansion. They were to be a light for the nations to open the eyes of the blind. Israel failed in that task in some pretty catastrophic ways. That’s a story for another day, but when Jesus came and pronounced judgment on Israel, that was one of the reasons why. Israel was supposed to be a light for the world. Now Jesus’s disciples hear him saying to them, “You are the light of the world” and I imagine that they might have been startled. We’re going to look more closely at this idea as we get further into our Romans series, but at this point we’re already getting a hint that it’s Christians, the followers of Jesus, who are the heirs of the Abrahamic promise and are the true light of the world.

And what kind of light are we? What sort of light do we shine? It’s the light of Jesus, of course. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world.” He is “The true light, which gives light to everyone,” it says in John. Christians are not light because we have any light that comes from within us. Christians are the light of the world because we are the ones who shine the light of Christ, who is the true light. We’ve talked before about the idea that in a sense we act as a mask of God. It’s our face that the world sees, but God is the one behind the mask. It’s his love that is the real force behind everything that we do. We’re just a mask. In this metaphor, think of yourself as a thin paper mask - so thin that the light shines right through it, like a lamp shade. You are the light of the world. But it isn’t your light. Jesus is the light. We’re just a thin paper mask. So if you want to know what kind of light we are, then we have to look at Jesus. What kind of light was he? That’s what we are, and what we are called to be.

So let’s do that. Jesus is described as a light in several different ways in the Bible. First, as we’re learning in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is the light because he lights the way and shows us which way we should go. He shows us what we ought to do. In the spirit of thinking poetically, consider this. After the Exodus, the people of God were led through the dark in the wilderness by a pillar of fire. Yet amazingly, in Jude we’re told that it was Jesus who led Israel out of Egypt. What did Jesus have to do with the Exodus? Well, he was there. The light of the world was there in the wilderness from the very beginning, lighting the way and leading his people in the way that they should go. And he is still lighting the way. Jesus does much more than this, but by his words and his actions, he shows us how we ought to act and which way we should go.

If we are the light of the world, then we would expect the church, as we follow Jesus, to have that kind of role in the world, and we do. The church has a prophetic voice in the culture. People have said before that the church is culture’s conscience. There’s a sense in which we say to the world, “Follow us as we follow Christ.” When a company, a community, or even a government is asking, “Should we do this, or should we do that?” Christians are called to be a light. That’s an important idea when you’re thinking about things like Christians in public service, or even the relationship between the church and the state. I don’t have all of those answers, but it’s a relevant application and it’s important to think about.

Jesus is the light because he lights our way. Secondly, he is the light because he allows us to see ourselves rightly. He is the light that reveals what’s in our hearts. In John, Jesus says this, speaking of himself:

And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.

Daniel told us last week how Jesus came as a new and better Moses. He came, in a sense, with a new and better law. Jesus came and said, “You thought you were ok because you’ve never murdered anyone and you’ve never had an affair. But I’m telling you that if you’ve been angry with your brother, or looked at a woman lustfully, you are also condemned.” Jesus is the light that exposes sin in our hearts and allows us to see ourselves as we really are apart from God. He did it by his words, and also by his perfect, sinless behavior, which is always there in front of us and looming above us as a standard that we know we can never meet.

So then how do the people of God act as a light in the world to show people their condition apart from Christ? The most important way is the proclamation of the Word. To be a light in the world means that when we encounter sin, we speak the Word of God in response to it and bring it into the light. Light is a disinfectant. Just like bacteria, sin can’t survive exposure to the light. When the light is turned on, our only responses are to either scurry away like a roach, or to stay in the light and allow Jesus to do his cleansing work. The charge is for us to be bold in bringing sin into the light. That starts with confession of our own sin. You can’t be a light while you are hiding in the darkness. But if you are faithfully confessing and allowing Jesus to deal with your own sin, then you are in a position to speak the Word of God with confidence when you encounter sin in others. We learned last week that a peacemaker is one who makes peace, not one who avoids conflict. There can be no peace with God or with each other while sin lies festering in the dark. When you encounter sin, either yours or someone else’s, bring it into the light.

And just like Jesus, we expose the sinfulness of the world with our behavior as well. Remember the Proverb that I quoted earlier, how a piece of bread or a drink of water for your enemy can be like heaping burning coals on his head. The result may very well be that he sees your good works and thinks, “I’ve never seen that before. I’m not like that at all.” And perhaps he may start to get a sense that God might not approve of his behavior. Your good deed has brought his sinful heart into the light, where God may very well do a work and bring another one into the kingdom. Because, of course, Jesus doesn’t just expose our sin. He is the light that burns our sin away. We have a light of hope to offer to the world only insofar as we point the world to him.

That leads us to the third way in which Jesus is a light that we are called to shine. Jesus allows us to see ourselves rightly. But more importantly, he is the light that allows us to see God rightly. In Jesus we see God as he really is. In 2 Corinthians 4, Paul says:

For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

No one can see God. So the way that we receive knowledge of the glory of God is by looking to Jesus. What is God like? Well, what was Jesus like? We know something about that. People saw him. We have stories about him, and we have his teaching. We have a picture that we can understand that shows us what God is like. Colossians says that “He is the image of the invisible God.” In Hebrews, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” So Jesus is the light of the world because in him we see the image and glory of God.

How do we, then, act as a light to the world to show the world what God is like? That’s the charge, as intimidating and humbling as it sounds. We, the people of God, by our words and our behavior, give the world a picture of what God is like. We bear his name, and people are watching us. It’s possible for us to give the wrong picture, and we sometimes do. But one way or another, we are saying something about what God is like. And if Jesus is the light that shows us what God is like, then the way that we’re going to give the world an accurate image of God is simply by imitating Jesus. Paul told the Corinthians to “imitate me as I imitate Christ.” Are you striving to treat your children, your neighbors and your co-workers in a way that accurately reflects what God is like and that point them to Him? You should be. If you would, then imitate Jesus. “What would Jesus do?” turned into a cliche some years ago, but it’s exactly the right question. Imitate him, and as you do, the world will look at us and see something of the glory of God.

But of course imitation isn’t the only way that we point people to God. There isn’t much point in showing people the light if you don’t offer them any way of getting from the darkness to the light. Jesus is the light, not only because he shows us what God is like, but because he provides the way for us to be reconciled to God, and to be brought from darkness into light. So then, you are the light of the world because you are the messengers who carry the good news that the light has come, that he suffered the darkness in our place, and that the world has access to the blessings of the kingdom if they bow to King Jesus and put their faith in him. May our words always be seasoned with the message of the gospel.

Jesus then goes on to make a point about light similar to what he said about salt. This time he’s pointing out the absurdity of a light that doesn’t shine.

A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

A hidden city on a hill isn’t a thing. A lamp under a basket is not something that people do. If it’s a light, it shines. You are the light of the world, so let your light shine. But Jesus is saying a bit more than that. He uses another metaphor here that is laden with meaning. “A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” The image of the people of God as a city is one that will reverberate through the rest of the New Testament, especially in Hebrews and Revelation. We don’t have time to explore it. For today, let’s just notice that Jesus isn’t describing his disciples as individual candles, spread out across the earth. He’s describing them as a community. The light that shines brightly for the world to see is in fact a community of lights - a city of lights. In each house in that city is a lamp. The lamp is not under a basket, but on a stand, shining brightly, lighting up the whole house and bursting out of the windows. But what those outside of the walls see and are affected by is the entire city of lights, shining alongside and in and among one another. A city on a hill cannot be hid. The church is God’s plan for the salvation of the world.

Jesus came proclaiming that the kingdom of God had come. Being salt and light is not about making life a little better. It’s about implementing the reign of God on earth. “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in Heaven.” If you want England to be more Norman, you bring a bunch of Normans to England and tell them to act like Normans. If you want the world to be more Christian, you send the church out into the world and tell them to act like Jesus. Living in the kingdom of God means becoming more like our king. We’re going to spend the rest of the summer thinking harder about what it means to be more like King Jesus. As we do, let’s press in to know him better. Let’s pray that God would continue to mold us and shape us more and more into the image and likeness of Jesus. And let’s pray that he would give us boldness to be like Jesus out in the world for everyone to see, knowing that this is God’s plan, not only to save you and I, but to save the whole world.