Commenting on the famous "Salt and Light" passage of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:13-16), Dale Bruner writes:
“Christians who are Christians are the salt of the earth…. ‘You folks are,’ not ‘You folks ought to be,’ the most significant people on the planet. This priority of assertion to injunction (of indicative to imperative, of evangel to ethos) says again that Jesus supports before he challenges, that he tells disciples who they are before he tells them what they are to do, that he gives Blessings before Commands. Christians are, Christians are, by the simple fact that they are with Jesus, the salt of the earth. The Christian ethic is an ethic of “become what you are” rather than the Greek or Confucian ethic of “become what you should be.” (Matthew: A Commentary, Vol 1., p. 188)
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