Salt of the Earth
On Monday at morning prayer – 9.15am – all welcome! We had an interesting reading from Leviticus. I think it’s fair to say that our hearts sank when we initially saw what the reading was going to be. Leviticus is known for being full of laws – some of them rather bizarre to the modern ears.
· Sacrificing animals with damaged testicles is forbidden.
· Eating locusts: good. Drinking blood: bad
· Death awaits those who rebel against their parents.
· Sideburns – do not cut the hair on the sides of the head
Some of these sound ridiculous now, but the point of them was a call to holiness. The early Jewish community felt God telling them to distance themselves from anything impure or corrupt. That’s because God is holy so those who belong to God are to be holy too.
The challenge of books like Leviticus is that there are 613 rules and regulations – some of them quite bizarre to us today. It’s easy to see why Christians have been dismissive of the Hebrew Testament – caricaturing it as being all about obeying the law. Marcion, a 2nd century theologian, posited a different God of the Old Testament - Demiurge. He thought Christians should scrap the OT completely. Other forms of this is the belief that Christianity has replaced, or superseded, Judaism. Such views have more than a whiff of anti-Semitism.
However, if you look more deeply into the Hebrew Scriptures, and into the law, you get a glimpse of what they were about. It’s important to listen to the witness of the Hebrew Bible without imposing on it a prearranged theological schema based on the NT (R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology).
In fact, the law, from the Hebrew word Torah, shouldn’t simply be reduced to a legal corpus of laws to follow, or even technically as the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuch.
It’s more broadly to be understood as about the life of God’s people under the covenant. In the Hebrew scriptures, the prophetic books don’t come last so as to lead into the New Testament. Rather, they follow the Pentateuch, as a commentary on it. And what did the prophets say?
They gave plumb lines - or barometers - in discerning what is good and right and wise. The Jewish community were exhorted to choose life. The two paths set before them were clear: life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, if you love the Lord your God, walk in his ways, then you’ll be blessed and will flourish. If you don’t you’ll suffer the inevitable consequences of alienation from God.
Rejection of the truth of God’s love leads to the dehumanising of the weak and vulnerable. It also degrades the powerful too; their ill-treatment of others strips away their own dignity. The image of God in them is marred. This path doesn’t lead to truth and life. The prophet reminded God’s people to follow their vocation. It’s when they feed the hungry, when they help the homeless, the widow, and the orphan, that his ‘light shall break forth’ and ‘the glory of the Lord’ shall be their ‘rearguard’ (Isaiah 58.8).
In sum, the OT presents these two paths laid before the Jewish community and, indeed, for us: and we are encouraged to choose the path of life, the path that makes for human flourishing.
If that’s the case, what do we make of Jesus rather lax attitude with regard to the law. In our Gospel reading, Jesus is in conflict with the religious leaders – the scribes, the lawyers, the Pharisees. They want to know Jesus’ views on the commandments. They thought Jesus was a libertarian because he kept on blurring the boundaries and overstepping the mark with the 613 rules. He mixed with the wrong people (women, children, foreigners, outcasts – many of whom would make him ritually impure). Jesus would go to the wrong places (at parties, on the streets) on the wrong days (the Sabbath) and in the wrong way (without the priests). (John Pritchard)
So when Jesus explains that he hasn’t come to abolish the law, but that he’s come to fulfil them, what does he mean?
Like the Hebrew prophets, Jesus is inviting his hearers to reflect more deeply on the commandments. He actually intensifies some of the commandments – it’s not enough to not kill. Even to look with hatred at a brother or sister is to kill. Jesus knows that even if we keep the commandment to not kill, we can still hate and despise others. Jesus challenged the religious leaders’ perspective on simply being moral rule keepers. He showed us the way to transcending legalism – a temptation for any religion.
When the ways of life are imprinted on your hearts, when you live this way as a community, you will become salt and light in the world. And what we know about salt is that it’s meant to enhance, to preserve, to add flavour. In conclusion, a few thoughts on our call to be salt.
Debie Thomas makes the point that while salt has many good properties, it’s not meant to dominate. For example, many people today see the church as hoarding its power – not giving it away. For shaming, not blessing. The church is too often known for using words to burn, not heal. I think that has been the cause of upset due to the Bishop’s recent statement on civil partnership. Whatever your view is on this, we need to worry when, as happened last week, a gay man popped into church and asked Fr Neil if he and his partner was allowed in? That he had to ask this question is shocking. This, surely, is when salt has become domineering; when salt stings… in a negative, alienating way. This is not the path to live life in its fullness.
Salt at its best sustains and enriches life. It pours itself out with discretion so that God’s kingdom – or God’s way of doing things – might be known on the earth. May we shine as lights in the world to witness to a kingdom of spice and zest, a kingdom of health and wholeness, a kingdom of varied depth, flavour, and complexity, offering to all a glimpse of God’s healing love.
Reference:
Highly recommending reading - John Barton, The History of the Bible.