We are in the second of five weekends where for the gospel reading we are hearing some of the most famous passages from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel. So if you haven’t read the Sermon on the Mount in a while, this is a great opportunity to take some time this coming week and read the whole thing. It’s only three chapters, about 2400 words, in those few pages it is a whole other way of living than the one we know, really it’s a blueprint for way the Kingdom of God Jesus said he was bringing is supposed to work. It’s wonderful even though it all sounds impossible: You know what Jesus says there: forgive endlessly, don’t judge, care nothing about money, love your enemies, honor the meek, and the hungry, and the peacemakers in this world. A world where everyone did this would be great. It’s what we all want.
And today we find out something about how this is all supposed to come about. It involves people realizing that somehow, they are the light that the world needs. And of all the impossible things Jesus said to this crowd listening to him, maybe this was the hardest to believe. It shouldn’t be that hard to put ourselves in their position. Many of the people who came out that day to hear Jesus had no resources, no power in the world, no ability to change anything. Yet Jesus tells them what they do all have is light, and light is the way to get rid of darkness. And yet their light is covered up with a basket. Just maybe, Jesus implies, just maybe they covered it up themselves.
So this is a very challenging idea for us today, asking ourselves whether we have found a way to do the same thing: whether we have taken some amazing power given to us by God and found reasons to put it away.
In a way, doing this would be very human. None of us feel very ready to do anything that we think of as heroic or exceptional. But there’s more than that going on. During the course of our lives all sorts of forms of discouragement settle in, we get beaten up by life and decide that nothing we do makes any difference. We exaggerate our own imperfections and failings and ordinariness, we convince ourselves of the pointlessness of our efforts before we even make them. This is darkness that we often don’t even see coming to surround us.
It is true that we live in a dark world. All day long we hear other people demeaned and demonized, and that too can make us feel exhausted and powerless and discouraged. We can lose a sense of the importance of who we are and what we do, and even worse, we can also lose a sense of the importance of all the things we decide not to do, all the light that never shines into the darkness. And these opportunities lost pose serious questions for us.
Throughout the gospels Jesus talks constantly about the sin represented by things not done, by love that never gets brought to life. It’s why he tells so many stories and parables about this, stories about people who had the power to forgive and did not, people who had the power to be generous and chose not to be, people who had the power to do something or say something about a desperate situation and found reasons not to. These are all stories about people living in isolation, not seeing their real connection with the brothers and sisters that surround them. They are light that is not going anywhere, so it may as well not be light at all.
And yet in the end, we are not being asked here to do something that is superhuman, something that involves powers that very few people have. When Jesus calls us the light of the world here he seems to be speaking of it like it’s the most natural thing in the world for us to realize, we already have this light, all of us, it’s God’s free gift. We just have to stop withdrawing it, hiding it. We do not have the power to change the world but we have the power to cast light onto it, we have the power to stop concealing the gift of mercy and that God has given us abundance of. The Sermon on the Mount is showing us a world where everyone is interconnected, where simple acts and changes end up changing everything. Yet we hold ourselves back, we know we do, and the call today is to notice all the reasons we have given ourselves for doing this, and to do the hard work of putting those reasons aside.
You know sometimes people ask why with the world in such terrible shape, injustice and distrust everywhere, God doesn’t just send down a thunderbolt to take care of all this. I think the Sermon on the Mount is the thunderbolt, this is how the world changes, ordinary light, offered over and over, not hidden away in a private space where it does nothing. We are the light of the world, just waiting to be seen.