“I Am With You Always”: How We are Salt and Light

Dead metaphors

In another life, I briefly taught creative writing. We didn’t get off to a promising start: they were undergraduate Communications students, with a large sense of self and little deep experience of life. I was an anxious, quietly entitled adjunct who, after four years of doctoral study, resented teaching first years. Four or so weeks in, along with readings and examples, I gave them the task of writing a poem—not just any poem: a love poem. Romantic love is—perhaps especially at age 19—one of the more amorphous, unstable phenomena out there; it’s hard enough for us to get a grip on ourselves, let alone on such galloping emotion. So it’s natural enough that my students would reach for overly familiar images. I found myself staring at a pile of poems that were replete with red roses, sunsets of longing, wounded hearts, and hungry eyes. Familiarity, the proverb advises us, breeds contempt. My students, in struggling to pin down love, had resorted to these near-dead metaphors. The unfortunate result was poems that struggled to get my attention.

Typically, the remedy to cliché is to go off the beaten path, to find a fresh and lively way to convey the reality you’re hoping to get at. This is what I suggested my students do with their poems. But there is another, more drastic way. In this way, we keep the faded, worn image at the centre; it is, after all, precious—that’s precisely why we’ve over-used it in the first place. We then look at the room we’ve arranged around it—the careless assumptions, the framework we chose because it suited us, the clutter of unstudied experience that we’ve left propped up all over the place—and we then begin to clear a space. As we do, light falls again on the important image—a red rose, let’s say, or the Sunday school metaphor of being light or salt—and it turns to us and speaks a fresh, life-changing word.

In what follows here, I attempt this more drastic way. I want to restore our understanding of two images from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: “You are the salt of the earth”, and “You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-14). These images are touchstones for following Jesus into the world, and for what Christians are within God’s unfolding purposes. They concern questions that arise for Jesus’s people every day, often with urgency: What is it that God requires of me, and what am I for the world? But for many of us, these images are Christian clichés: “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine”. By the time we reach our 20s, these images of salt and light have become thoroughly domesticated. For many Christians, they’re shorthand for: “Get out in the world and try hard to be a good influence. Be salt! Be light! Don’t become useless! Don’t hide!” And so these overly familiar images become propped about by anxious thoughts (“Am I doing enough, God?”), and by joyless effort: “This little light of mine, I’m going to make it shine.”

Here, as the sense of over-familiarity rises and you’re tempted to scroll away, let me say: these images of Jesus are electric. They’re like two live wires sticking out of the wall of your living room. They seem inert, bare—harmless. Yet each carries a charge that runs right back through Scripture, and right on into the strange, enduring confidence of the Church. Reach out, and you’ll touch a live current into God’s unwavering faithfulness, into his resolve to bless the world and to bring humanity into lasting relationship, and—consequently—into the nature of Christian life here, right now. For these images are not merely about an idea of good influence. Rather, they testify: the world you think you know—the world of your colleagues and your household and the newsfeed—is in fact the theatre of God’s redeeming action. And this action is uniquely unfolding through the Risen Jesus in the lives of all those who bear his name. God is at work in the world; to follow Jesus is to find yourself caught up in this ministry of reconciliation.

A dream of Christian influence

Let’s begin with something strange. Jesus’s final words in the Gospel of Matthew are these: “I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (28:20). You perhaps find these words comforting, a nice thought for the day. Perhaps the thought of always finding yourself in Jesus’s company is unsettling. But I’ll wager this: most of us don’t treat these words with anything like the profound respect and life-change they deserve. Strangely, most of us would far rather be given a job to do than explore the full meaning of life with Jesus “always, to the very end of the age”. We’d far rather finish at his words immediately prior—“go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). Now there’s something concrete to work with! Being given a job to do is, after all, something we know from the world around us, something we respect: “Let’s be about making a difference”; “Let’s be the change we want to see”; “If you want results, put the work in”; “God has shown us what is needed—we need to crack on and make it happen”, etc. But embrace this posture for too long, and you’ll find faith starves to a stark activism: we knuckle down to works of mercy and evangelism, whipping up home-made versions of justice, coming out with arrogant (downright awkward) proclamation. This little light—of mine—I’m going to let it shine.

Why point this out? There is—let me venture something here—a dream of Christian influence; it loves a call to action. But it is a dream. Even as it celebrates the many, very real ways that Christians have influenced—and continue to influence—communities, institutions, policies, disciplines, networks, whole sectors, whole nations, this dream ignores the deep wellsprings of every lasting instance of Christian impact. It ignores the fact that women and men throughout the ages of the Church have been able to imagine and plan and speak and act for the good of the world and the glory of God precisely because Jesus is with them always, even to the end of the age. In this way, it revels in the fruit and forgets the tree. It fantasizes about Christian greatness, and loses sight of the only great Master. It fails to reckon with what Jesus’s ministry and death—God’s way of dealing with evil and human rebellion—might mean for Christians as we faithfully bear witness among the dark powers of this world. It disbelieves the angel’s declaration that Jesus is risen, is alive and leading women and men today by the Holy Spirit. And because it arises out of dreaming, this posture of influence is insecure and strident, and vulnerable to being taken over by other powerful ideals: nationalism, say, or the melee of self-determinations that fund the angry moralising of our present moment. All to say: we love being told there’s a job for us; we are stirred by the vague ideal of being salt and light. And so we begin with a dream and good intentions; all too often, we end up jaded and joyless, serving a different dream.

And yet, Jesus’s final words in Matthew stay with us. Much as we’d like God just to give us a mandate, it seems he is intent on more than me “making a difference”. Jesus’s words top off a great theme of Scripture. For God’s way with this darkened world goes to the heart of the problem, our rebellious inclination to live from and by and for ourselves. “I will be with you”, God says to his people, over and over: to Isaac, to Jacob, to Moses, to Joshua, to Gideon, to Solomon, to Isaiah, to Jeremiah, to Haggai. God’s way is covenant relationship, calling humanity out of darkness into light, calling them through purifying deserts into grateful flourishing, calling after them in their rebellion, calling to them in their exile. This is a relationship that is grounded in the unshakable security and burnishing love of God’s presence, and it is geared for a selfless, radiant expression of love. And in this, there’s a great plan for divine influence—literally, for a great flowing out into the world—through this flowering of covenant relationship. Israel, this called-out people, is meant to be a blessing to all the earth, even as they walk in trusting relationship with God (Genesis 22:18). So when Jesus says to his disciples “I am with you always, to the very end of the age”, we need to hear these echoes and understand that through Jesus something very big—something world-influencingly big—is going on.

The flowering of covenant faithfulness

So far, we’ve been clearing away the clutter. We’ve bagged the assumption that Christianity is merely about cracking on with God’s jobs, applying Jesus’s ideals to our situation. As we did, we noticed this assumption was tangled up with a dream of Christian influence. But already, a large outline from Scripture—a governing frame of Matthew’s gospel—is starting to show: God’s plan is to reconcile the world to himself through a restored people, a people whose lives are themselves reordered by God’s reconciling ways, and centred on the reality of God’s living presence within them. Our tired images of “salt and light” need to be understood in the context of this reality: that through the faithful human and faithful Israelite Jesus, God is creating a restored people, a people whose lives—their eating, sleeping, praying, working, reconciling lives—are filled to the brim with God’s “with you” presence.

We must, therefore, approach these two key images of divine influence in the way Matthew does: through the person of Jesus. Firstly, as his Teaching on the Mountain (chaps 5-7) suggests, Jesus is the new Moses, the leader through whose obedient action and life-giving teaching God is delivering people free from sin and death. Like Moses, and in fulfilment of prophecy, he spends his early years in Egypt (2:15). Just as Moses led his people through the Red Sea and into the desert, so Jesus passes through the waters of baptism and is led into the wilderness for 40 days and nights, a place of testing. Like Moses, Jesus goes up a mountain and calls a people into a renewed covenant relationship with God, establishing this with teaching that sets existence on a totally new footing, like a house built on rock (7:24-27). It’s centred on the in-breaking reality of “The Kingdom of Heaven”, God’s rule and reign made present in and through the life of Jesus himself. As his name suggests, Jesus is himself “the Lord saves” (1:21). And this new reign of God in the midst of the world’s dark powers entails the deepest transformation of human lives, as the healings and deliverances of his ministry attest. Through Jesus, other lives come to experience God’s rule and reign—and themselves begin to overflow.

Secondly, this person, “the Lord saves”, is also Immanuel, “God with us” (1:23). How deep does that with go? Here, we must reckon with the divine character—with love. God does not simply impose his rule and reign, obliterating its distorted structures, annihilating rebellion, upending creation as a lost cause. In this person Immanuel, God does something only God can do: he enters into creation to be with creation. Without disrupting the integrity of creation, God establishes “space” for free relationship with creation at its deepest level—at the level of being. When most of us affirm that in Jesus God is with us what we mean is solidarity: God’s by our side; he’s sticking with us. But Matthew recalls the prophet’s words in order to point to a profounder reality: “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (1:23). This is divine being with thoroughly human being, divine rule exerting its influence from within creation. This never-before event, the virgin-born child, is the in-breaking of God’s resolution to set all reality on a new footing. In Jesus God begins a new out-flowing of divine love, so that one day all creation, everywhere, and in every way, will be with God, never more to be separated by sin and death. Jesus thus brings Israel’s “with God” life to a definitive and new point of flowering. Here, finally, is “the son of David, the son of Abraham” (1:1), the pivot point of Israel’s call to bless all the nations. The new Moses, he comes not to abolish the Law or the Prophets “but to fulfil them” (5:17). Through the promised Messiah, the covenant is flowering—that great plan of divine influence, an outflowing of blessing that God might be with all creation.

In Jesus, then, God is on the move, drawing near to bring his rule and reign to deliver humanity from sin and death. Through Jesus, he is drawing all humanity into lasting and utterly life-giving relationship with him. And he is beginning this work in the lives of all those who turn around to see and believe that God’s peace and justice are now being established here on earth as they are in heaven: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near”! (4:17). At the same time, the lives of these women and men are the beachhead of God’s deliverance. They are called, healed, humbled, taught. He’s establishing his rule and reign within them, and extending his rule and reign through them, even as he is with them always, to the end of the age. In these ways, they can only be the living sign of God’s faithfulness to his promises, and to creation.

The salt and the light

It’s this reality Jesus is pointing us to when he declares: “You are the salt of the earth”. The metaphor of “salt” is rich, culturally and historically ubiquitous, thick with multiple associations. But when set within the frame of God’s unfolding covenant purposes, certain meanings come to the fore (I acknowledge my debt here to the excellent BibleProject podcast on these images). In a world without refrigeration, salt is a vital means of making food—and therefore life—endure. It’s thus a sign of covenant relationship, of the with-God life. Israel are to season all their offerings with salt (Leviticus 2:13). Indeed, the covenant is called “an everlasting covenant of salt”, a sign of enduring faithfulness (Numbers 18:19). It’s also associated with purity and with cleansing—with our need to return to just, life-giving, healthy relationships with creation, with one another, and with God. Understood within the frame of God’s covenant purposes then, salt is both sign and means of God’s enduring, life-giving, purifying faithfulness. When he says “You are the salt of the earth”, Jesus understands his followers to be both a sign and a means of God’s enduring purpose to draw all things into flourishing relationship.

What about that well-worn metaphor light? What might Jesus mean when he says “You are the light of the world”? How does this convey the flowing of God’s reconciling purpose in the Messiah, through his people, into the world? Jesus’s has three facets: a prominent light such as a lamp on a stand; a town that, by virtue of its hilltop location, likewise cannot be hidden; and “good deeds” that bring glory to God. There’s another place in Scripture where we find such a triad: the book of Isaiah. Indeed, as we’ll explore, Jesus’s teaching concentrates Isaiah’s use of the “light” image. In Isaiah 2, Jerusalem, the “mountain of the Lord’s temple” is “established as chief among the mountains… raised above the hills” (2:2). “[A]ll nations will stream to it”, declares the prophet. Where in the beginning the rivers of the world flowed down from Eden, the place of God’s presence, now the nations river up to God’s mountain. They come to learn, to be enlightened by God:

Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths. (2:3)

What happens as the peoples come to walk in God’s ways? Good deeds—acts of right relationship with God and others, of repentance, justice and mercy that reflect God’s reconciling purpose:

He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore. (2:4)

And this vision of God’s rule and reign is brought home to Israel with the image of light:

Come, house of Jacob,
let us walk in the light of the Lord. (2:5)

The call to seek shalom lands first at the feet of the covenant people: to be lit up by God’s presence, and to be stewards of this vision of all peoples reconciled.

But walking in the light is not the same as being the light. How else is Jesus drawing on Isaiah? In Isaiah 42, Israel’s covenant life is renewed and concentrated in the figure of The Servant, called by God “my chosen one in whom I delight” (42:1). On him God will put his Spirit, “and he will bring justice to the nations.” God himself speaks to the Servant, promising that he himself will be with the Servant, and that from this intimacy will flow the renewal of God’s reconciling purpose, for the good of all the world:

I will take hold of your hand.
I will keep you and will make you
to be a covenant for the people
and a light for the nations. (42:6)

The covenant Servant, then—the renewal of Israel’s life with God—has become the light of the world. Indeed, Matthew’s Gospel makes this link with Isaiah clear: he quotes Isaiah 9, revealing that the Servant is, in fact, Jesus of Nazareth.

Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
the way to the sea, along the Jordan,
Galilee of the nations—
the people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
a light has dawned. (Matthew 4:15-16)

Here, then, is the promised one in whom God delights, the light to “those living in the land of the shadow of death”.

This is, then, no little light. Here is the “great light” of the messianic Servant, the one who knows fulness of life with God, and whose life results in the deliverance for the peoples of the world—from death, and from all that troubles “the land of the shadow”. So far, so good. But how, then, can Jesus the Great Light say to his followers “You are the light of the world”? How can it be that this light is yours? In Isaiah 60, the light imagery comes to a climax. God speaks to an Israel who have been renewed through the faithfulness of the suffering Messiah:

Arise, shine, for your light has come
and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.
See, darkness covers the earth
and thick darkness is over the peoples,
but the Lord rises upon you
and his glory appears over you.
Nations will come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your dawn. (60:1-3)

The Lord rises over the lives of his people, flooding them with his presence, touching every part of their lives. And here, a profound thing happens: those illuminated lives themselves become lit up, as if from within: “Then you will look and be radiant” (60:5). This is why the Lord says to his renewed people, “Arise, shine”: because the glory of the Lord has risen in the person of the Servant. And they themselves are become radiant: they reflect back and give out this same light. It’s manifest in Jesus-centred, Spirit-enabled acts of righteousness and mercy and peace-making and justice, the outworking of this new with-you life with God. Even as Jesus’s followers delight in intimacy with God, the words of their mouths, the meditation of their hearts, and the works of their hands shine out, full of the rumour of who God is.

With Jesus, with joy

This, then, is why I began with Jesus’s words, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (28:20). We can only be light because Jesus is the light of God, because God’s purpose to restore all creation to relationship is fulfilled in this faithful human, this faithful Israelite. Through Jesus, we hear God saying to us also: “I will take you by the hand. I will keep you and make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the nations.” And Jesus is not merely the means of reconciliation, but—as God with us—is the enduring centre. That is why he begins that most famous of Christian job descriptions with these words: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (28:18) As his name reminds us, “Jesus” is the Lord himself saving creation from the scourge of sin and death. His is the government firmly established at the centre of all things. This is the light that shines out as Christians “go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20). This is the working of divine influence, the great flowing out of God’s free determination in Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to be “with you always, to the very end of age” (28:20).

So where does this leave us? How are we to be salt, to be light? In what manner are Christians to influence the world around us? Let me offer three basic convictions. None will give you the detail for your contexts; but without these any detail will go askew—I’ll attempt here to describe the tree, in the confident hope that, as you plant it in the soil of your own lives, the fruit will follow.

Firstly, we must repent. I know—not the answer you were looking for. But let me explain. Jesus’s ministry begins with this call to stop, turn around, and trust that God’s rule and reign are arrived in him. We’ve been walking in darkness, but now a great light has burst into the world. We know this because we see the transformed and healed lives: we see the fruit that comes from life with God. Once you see it, such new reality demands a response. It demands that we turn our eyes to the Lord—that we “look and be radiant”. As I respond to Jesus’s call to “Come, follow me” (Matthew 4:19), I begin to experience the with you life of God’s people. I say “begin”: this is a life-long journey of ever-increasing intimacy in which, more and more, in every corner of our lives, we learn to turn around and “walk in the light of the Lord”. If I want to be light at home, in my workplace, in planning and decision-making and leading, I must allow Christ’s light to illuminate all of who I am and all of what I do. Only then can I hope to know reliably what justice looks like in this or that context. Only then can we hope to be (as indeed the Church has been!) “joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer” (Romans 12:12). You ache for the world. You are exercised by injustice. You’re fired with a desire to share the good news. You dream of God’s influence in your communities, your nation, in this deeply divided world. Good. Then be reconciled yourself to God, right the way through, and all the way along. For the sake of this troubled world, ask Jesus to teach you the fulness of life with him, because there’s no other way that will lead to the life we all so badly need.

Secondly, we take up this ministry of reconciliation with authority. Jesus’s images are salt and light; Paul uses the complementary image of the ambassador. God has “reconciled us to himself through Christ”—we are now with God, enjoying his good rule over our lives, illuminated by his light (2 Corinthians 5:18). Having explored the logic of covenant, it won’t surprise us that God “has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christs’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us” (2 Corinthians 5:19-20). Here is an image of authority: you’re the appointed representative of God’s government. You’re on the ground, in-person. Simply by being there, you communicate God’s good intentions towards the peoples of the world. When you speak, you speak on behalf of your government, the Kingdom of Heaven. Your words, your very manner, make present the one to whom “All authority on heaven and on earth has been given”. To extend Paul’s metaphor, where you live and work is the sovereign territory of the Kingdom: your office, your classroom, this courtroom, that bedside, this building site, is made the inviolate domain of God’s good rule. We therefore act with delegated, Jesus-anchored authority. Lest we revert to the old way, this is not simply a matter of being given a job to do, but the out-flowing and representation of God’s reconciling purpose. Let us remember that ambassadors who take matters into their own hands sooner or later find themselves recalled! Like Jesus the Son, who does nothing on his own but speaks just what the Father has taught him (John 8:28), Christians are called to stay connected to the source, so that when others “see your good deeds” they naturally “glorify your Father in heaven”. This is why Paul urges, “We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20).

Finally, because of this live connection with the government at home we do not lose heart, but instead rejoice in ever-deepening intimacy with God. Christian faith does not properly look like loveless evangelism, like anxious or bitter activism, like joyless striving. It is not power-hungry. It is not given to fantasies of influence but, strangely, is unconcerned and joyful in the midst of the world. Over and over again, down through the ages, it taps in to hidden wellsprings of ideas and action for God’s shalom here and now. This faith is confident, anchored in the knowledge of the coming resurrection, and therefore willing to suffer, even as Jesus himself did. Why this joy? Whence this creativity? Why, it comes from God,

who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,”
made his light shine in our hearts
to give us the light
of the knowledge of the glory of God
in the face of Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6)

Amen! O Come, Immanuel!