Sometimes when we start talking about living in the Kingdom, there is a tendency to think that God’s reign and rule is simply a more poetic way to talk about legalism. We hear Jesus talk about “righteousness” and immediately think that what he means is “You have to be more moral, more obedient to the law, more ‘good’ than anyone else.” Indeed we can sometimes fall into the trap of believing that the announcement of the Kingdom is nothing more than recruitment for a more intense, more committed, “new and improved” religious person. (And some texts in the Sermon on the Mount like Matthew 5:17-21 seem to sound that way, but in truth don’t say that at all.)
But it isn't really about that at all. Sure, we are called to live moral lives. Yes, Christians should be "good". But at the same time, the point of the Kingdom isn't to show the world how good we are, but instead to point to the reality of God's remaking of the world by demonstrating his renewing effect in our lives.
When Jesus says to his disciples (with the crowds of uncommitted people listening in) “You are the salt of the earth…You are the light of the world” he is not saying that they “SHOULD BE” salt and light, but that they, in fact, ARE salt and light whether they want to acknowledge it or not. He is not exhorting them to live better, but instead reminding them that the way they live directly impacts the whole world.
In recognizing this little fact, we then see that the Sermon on the Mount is not moral exhortation at all, but instead a declaration that the difference that his calling makes on their lives is the difference God is making in the world.
The Sermon on the Mount is therefore not about urging us to be good, (indeed, being “good moral people” is what the Pharisees of Jesus’ day were best at) but instead encouragement to do the “good works” of the Kingdom, to live in ways that our distinctive to the reign and rule of our life so that in our distinctiveness we may be part of God’s plan to “preserve” his world and reveal his presence to it. But that requires that there is a distinctiveness, a difference to our lives that is only explainable in reference to the Kingdom.
As commentator Tom Wright has written, “God had called Israel to be the salt of the earth; but Israel was behaving like everyone else, with its power politics, its factional squabbles, its militant revolutions. How could God keep the world from going bad—the main function of salt in the ancient world—if Israel, his chosen salt, had lost its distinctive taste?”
Jesus’ teaching about salt and light is more a reminder to be who they now are in him, not a challenge to be something that they are not. When Israel, the early disciples or we Christians today forget that, the whole world “goes bad.”
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