Salt and Light - The Impossible Math of Matthew

You have heard this one preached as encouragement. Be salty. Shine bright. Make a difference.

That is not what is happening on that hillside.

Look at who is standing there. Matthew tells us exactly who came. The sick. The tormented. The demon-possessed. The lunatic. The palsied. They came from Galilee and Decapolis and Judaea and from beyond Jordan. Matthew names their afflictions and he names where they came from. He names no rulers. No elders. No men of standing.

And two verses earlier He has told them they will be reviled and persecuted and slandered.

Those are the people He turns to. And He says:

Ye are the salt of the earth.

Not you could be. Not you will be if you try harder. Present tense. Already true. Spoken over people the world had thrown away.

Then He says something that should stop you cold.

But if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?

Read it carefully. The thing that goes unsalted is not the salt. Salt is not salted. It is the earth. And there is no other salt — He named these people and no one else.

And the salt those people used was not the pure thing you keep on your counter. It came out of the flats mixed with everything else that was down there. Leave a batch of it long enough in a damp place and the salt draws out of the mixture. What is left fills the same jar. Weighs about the same. Looks the same grey. Nothing about it announces what has gone.

That is the failure He picked. Slow. Silent. Done to you rather than by you. Caused by nothing more dramatic than sitting where you sat, in contact with what moved through you.

And it explains why He never answers His own question. Leached salt is not weak salt. It is not salt at all. It is the residue that was always mixed in, and there is nothing left in it to bring back.

Then He switches pictures. A lamp under a basket. Still lit. Still burning. Lighting nothing. Everything intact except the one thing that mattered.

Both pictures fail the same way. Salt works by being unlike what it is in. A lamp shows by being unlike the dark. Stop being unlike, and there is nothing left to do. Look at where the salt ends up — trodden under foot of men, ground into the road, indistinguishable from what it was thrown onto. The thing appointed to be unlike the earth finishes as part of it.

And He is not finished. Four verses later He tells that crowd their righteousness has to exceed the scribes and the Pharisees or they do not enter the kingdom at all. Those men were not merely respected. They were the definition. They were what righteousness looked like. He tells a room full of fishermen and beggars that the highest standard they can name is not high enough.

Sit with that arithmetic. It is the point of it.

This episode works through what the passage says and refuses to fill in what it does not. What salt is for. Whether savour can come back. He leaves both open, and so do we.

The Bereans searched the scriptures daily to see whether those things were so. Do that here. Open Matthew 5. Read verses 13 through 20 for yourself, and check whether what you have been told about this passage is what it says.

Salt and Light - The Impossible Math of Matthew (article)

Episode Link:

https://www.rabbitholesandmeditations.com/salt-and-light-the-impossible-math-of-matthew/