FIFTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (February 5th) 2023
READINGS:
Isaiah 58: 1-9a
Psalm 112: 1-9
1 Corinthians 2: 1-12
Matthew 5: 13-20
I don't think we concentrate enough on the occasional
playfulness of Jesus in his teaching. Certainly today we have Isaiah reminding
us of the serious nature of the human need for God, highlighting the
selfishness that can cripple the human heart, both as individuals and as any
collection of people. Be it a church group, an entire region of the church, an entire
church nationally or internationally, we can get far too weighed down by our
own self importance, far too obsessed with our teachings, our rites and ceremonies,
and sadly our overdose of self- rather than divine righteousness.
Actually that's why Paul in the whole string of his
letters to the rather stroppy Corinthian church emphasizes that he seeks to empty himself
of ego, of self centeredness. He seeks to proclaim only the life, death, resurrection of
his Lord and ours, Jesus Christ. Sometimes though he's a little bit too complex
to deal with in a sermon, and perhaps we should journey through his thoughts in
a series of Lenten studies a little further down the track. If anyone is interested? Let me know if that's the case.
But Jesus is often a playful teacher. His humour
breaks through in ways that have been all but deadened through 2000 years of
solemnity, the very same solemn self righteousness, self
importance that I mentioned just before.
With deadened baggage it's sometimes hard to realise how Jesus plays with us when he puts to us the rhetorical question “If the salt has lost it saltiness how can it be made salty again?” Of course when we lose our way as we often do we might remember the first part of this Jesus saying, “You are the salt of the earth.” It is about us ... or of the impossibvility of being not-us. We tend to hear this as the threat of an angry teacher, a big red mark in the margin of our lives, rather than as a playful reminder that actually we cannot cease to be what God has made of us.
If God has made us salt then we are simply called to surrender to God. And Jesus says that's precuisely what God has done. Being Christians we turn that into a set of all but toxic rules, thou shalt not, rather than a warm invitation to behave, with the help of God who is forming us even now, behave as decent caring compassionate human beings made in the loving image of God.
In the end, love. And love is love, as we have learned recently to say, and as
those seeking to follow Jesus we might just add the joyful reminder that God is
love, and perhaps even love is God - or at least the very best taste of God
that we can receive.
So salt can't lose its saltiness because salt is salt
just the same as love is love. And the absence of salt is unsalt, just as the absence of love is unlove, or of course those other
words like indifference and hate. And when Jesus speaks of light and of our
being light, he is effectively saying the same thing, because light under let's say a saucepan is no longer light. It is just an extension of the
darkness. And for as long as we seek to be light, to be bearers of love and
hope, to be whisperers of words like "are you okay," then we will be light, and
not the unlight hiding in a saucepan with its lid on.
And I'm not even going into righteousness, the third
point of these three sayings of Jesus, except to say that as we open ourselves
up to the compassionate love and justice of God, to God's gentle healing touch
in all its forms, (and I might explain what I mean by that another time too), then
we become channels of that righteousness. We, ourselves! Make me a channel of your
peace, make me a channel of your righteousness, make me a channel of your love.
We can obliterate the signs of God in our lives but on
the whole we know when we're doing that, when selfishness, lovelessness, greed
and aggression become the hallmarks of our existence. Most of us aren't very
bad people, and I think in the context of these Jesus sayings our challenge is
simply to say help me this day to be salt, to be light, and to be compassionate
and just to those we meet.
By that can we be the sign of God's reign on earth as
it is in the heavens.
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