Have you ever lived a lie? Have you ever been someone that you aren’t?
It happens so easily. Hiding something. Addiction. Relationships that control and torture. Having to get by at a job that is really needed, but is miserable. Suffering, depression, mental illness?
“This is not who I am. Why am I doing this? Why did I do that? How can I get out of this?”
Living a lie has a habit of taking over our lives. Eventually we start to believe the lie ourselves, a false persona takes over, our cover identity takes over.
Have you ever lived a lie? Have you been someone that you aren’t?
A salt shaker that is all crusted up, a solid lump, encased in glass for all to see.
A flashlight with dead batteries, when darkness takes over it is reached for, clicked on but nothing happens.
Salt that can’t be used. Light that can’t shine. What good are they?
Can the salt be reminded? Can the light be reminded to be what they are and not something else?
Jesus was who he was, no lies, no pretending.
Jesus fulfills the law and the prophets, he completes, he finishes. That is who Jesus is, the fulfilling of all that God intends and dreams and hopes for, the fulfilling of what life lived without lies looks like.
The freedom and the beauty of God that sets us free, that is who Jesus is.
And this One, the One who fulfills and accomplishes true life, this One tells us to be what we are.
We are salt and light.
He doesn’t say to try harder to be more like salt and light but simply that we are salt and light for the world, for the earth.
That is who we are as God’s creatures, as those baptized into Christ, it is our calling, the fulfilling of who we are.
Be what we are: salt and light for the world.
Jesus is giving the famous Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapters five, six and seven. He is talking about life in God’s colony. Jesus is setting up God’s colony, the reclaiming of the world from the empire of the lie, the empire of the powerful who twist and control to get what they want.
God’s colony, where all relationships bring out the best in who we are, where all are set free from the lies that hold us captive.
The colony with a mission to the world, bringing light where it is dark, that brings the salt of enduring fellowship, the salt that brings out the flavor, the salt that preserves, that stops things from going rancid, the salt and light that break the power of the lies that bind.
That is what we are salt and light for the world.
Be what you are, Jesus tells us.
The world needs us to be salt and light.