The Importance of Pronouns: The 'You' and the 'They' of Matthew 5
Sermon on the Mount pt. 2
Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Matthew 5:11—16
The Beatitudes end in a strange way. Often the first verse of our text today is included with them. But there seems to me to be a big separation. The 8 Beatitudes, or Blessings, were all pronounced in the 3rd person and all followed the same form of blessing. With verse 11 our Lord has launched into something new, the first stage of the Sermon Proper.
The Beatitudes introduced a wisdom that was beyond that of ‘wisdom literature’, beyond the Proverbs of Solomon and similar, inferior productions. The previous wisdom literature focused on giving good advice based on the nature of Creation, that is things that will help you and make life better because of the way that the Lord designed the world. The blessings that the Beatitudes gave were not related to earthly life at all, were not advice or exhortation, but all focused on receiving the kingdom of Heaven, or seeing God, or receiving His mercy, except for the blessing on the meek and even it is a hope of an eschatological kind to ‘inherit the earth’ and as I argued those blessings were not pronounced on the moral or virtuous but on sinners. The Beatitudes focus on giving the blessing of Christ to sinful men. Having accomplished His goal of inviting all men to the hope of the Gospel, of announcing that our sins and failures are no obstacle to His Grace, Christ proceeds to describe the kingdom that He just finished promising.
Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Rather than promising blessings now to groups of people and allowing His listeners to consider what those groups might be and if they are in them, Christ now addresses them directly.(It should be noted that Luke records all of the beatitudes with a second person ‘you’ address) But who are these ‘they’ who revile and persecute ‘you’? Christ in a few short words has divided everyone into two camps—a you and a they. This is the sword with which Christ divides brother from brother for a thousand years, and it will come up repeatedly in a study of His sermon.
“Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it. Matthew 7:13—14
Note carefully how v.14 begins ‘Because narrow is the gate’, and though our more modern translations do away with this ‘because’, reducing it from a causative to a mere connection, a ‘but’ or an ‘and’, it is supported in the Greek as the cause why so many go in to destruction. Why do many go in by the gate that leads to destruction? Because of the narrowness of the Way that leads to Life. The Nature of the Way to Life, the nature of the Way, the Truth, and the Life is to be narrow and difficult. It is not a gate that a collective or a crowd can pass through but is a gate for individuals. It is not a gate that the majority or a plurality will ever choose. There are few who find it. The ‘They’ of Matthew 5 are the many. They walk through a gate so wide and broad that they do not even know that they have made a choice, a gate so diverse and inclusive that it seems to include the whole world. A way so tolerant that it only rejects the Narrow Gate and the individuals, the men, the women, and the children who find the Narrow Gate. The ‘They’ who revile and persecute the ‘You’ can be easily identified by their actions, again from later on in the Lord’s Sermon, ‘by their fruits you shall know them’. They slander and persecute the Saints, they falsely accuse those who hear the Lord’s voice just as they falsely accused the Hebrew Prophets. ‘They’ then are animated by the spirit which continually accused the saints and was booted from Heaven for it by the Child who Ascended to the Throne of God, the spirit which should be ashamed but is foolishly filled with Pride. ‘They’ are the collective, the mass. And though we are a body, we are always individuals. Though there are 5000 of us or an innumerable number yet we are as alone as Elijah or Athanasius and do not gain our significance, our confidence, or our courage from who or how many stand with us but are alone a brazen wall Contra Mundum, Contra Carnem, Contra Diabolum, Against the World, Against the Flesh, Against the Devil. You are blessed when the world curses you. You are blessed when you are hated. You are blessed when the Accuser doesn’t cease to accuse you day and night because of your fidelity to God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. You are blessed when you are a child and imitator of the Hebrew Prophets.
“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.
Believe it or not, there are not a lot of references to salt in the Bible. If it had been written in the American South and 1st and 2nd Casseroles had made it into the canon that might be different. But as it stands, most of the references to salt refer to the Salt Sea, which is the Dead Sea I think, there is Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt, and a few references to land being salted to make it unusable. But probably the one that concerns us here is found in Leviticus 2.
And every offering of your grain offering you shall season with salt; you shall not allow the salt of the covenant of your God to be lacking from your grain offering. With all your offerings you shall offer salt. Leviticus 2:13
Salt was necessary for the offerings made in the temple, and whenever we find lists of the supplies that the temple needs we generally find salt in the list. So, when Christ mentions the ‘salt of the earth’, it is likely that He has in mind the idea of the Earth being an offering to God, an offering which is being hindered by the salt having become ‘useless’ or ‘foolish’ which our translators have rendered contextually as ‘loses its flavor’. One more comment on verse 13. The word rendered for us ‘but’ would probably be better rendered ‘unless’ or literally ‘if not’. Salt that has lost its flavor is, in this passage, good for nothing unless or until it is trampled on by men. The flavor that God is looking for in His church is boot heel. The salt is capable of making the sacrifice acceptable only after it has been stomped on, persecuted. I think that the connection with verse 11 is very important to understand this passage. And I think that we can easily connect in our imagination persecution and saltiness. Salt is also a very obvious comparison to the prophets, simply think how flavorless our world would be without Elijah and Ezekiel or Jeremiah’s salty tears.
But more specifically in the three cases I named and in the prophets and their heirs generally, the salt must be made salty by persecution, and the faith which sees this persecution as a blessing.
Blessed are you when men hate you,
And when they exclude you,
And revile you, and cast out your name as evil,
For the Son of Man’s sake.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy!
For indeed your reward is great in heaven,
For in like manner their fathers did to the prophets.
“But woe to you who are rich,
For you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full,
For you shall hunger.
Woe to you who laugh now,
For you shall mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all men speak well of you,
For so did their fathers to the false prophets. Luke 6:22—26
The Pharisees and Lawyers claimed to be the heirs of the prophets but were really the heirs of the prophets’ persecutors. They admired the prophets and built tombs for them but never walked in their footsteps, as sons do their father’s. They were the boots that made the Prophets and Apostles salty. The Son of the Owner had come to the garden and found the fruit tasteless and the hired gardeners were beginning by this time to understand how he felt about them and their labors. But can a man really love the prophets so much that he follows them into fire and persecution? Or what will make our Low T, metrosexual generation like, not merely our earthly fathers but our spiritual forebears, the Reformers and the Martyrs and the Apostles and the Prophets?
You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.
Persecution is not something accidental or that the kingdom can dispense with. The Lamp is not hidden under a basket but is lifted up onto a lampstand to give light to all in the house, to draw all men to Himself. You are the light of the world but your light cannot be made visible by ‘having a winsome manner’, or an ‘evangelistic spirit’, or ‘being on fire for God’ unless you mean literally being lit as Nero may have used Christians to light his garden. Much less will you light up a dark world by being electable, or within the window of what society thinks is acceptable or normal. The lampstand is the key to all of this though so let us not misidentify it, because nothing else will enable the light that was placed in you and I to light up the world. The Lampstand is the Cross, the Cross that you are called to take up, or rather be taken up by. You have already been declared by Christ to be a lamp, the light of the world, all that is necessary to enlighten that world is that you be raised up on the lampstand of His Cross. We are not called to follow Christ in teaching, or follow Him in healing, or follow Him in ‘speaking truth to power’, except incidentally. We are called essentially and indispensably to take up our cross and follow Him. It was in being pursued by Ahab, hiding and crying out that he was the last of the prophets alive that Elijah became salt whose taste remains in the mouth of humanity 2700 years later. It was when thrown into a sewer that Jeremiah became a bronze wall against adulterous Judah. It was as the stones were flying that Stephen saw the risen Lord and obtained a better testimony. In short, all that we hope for our country and our world is not to be obtained through our victory but through our defeat. I have called my commentary on current events MASA-Make America Small Again, but perhaps I should have gone further to make my point and called it Make America Dead Again. The Gospel has nothing whatsoever to say about conserving and healing a sick and corrupt nation, but everything to say about raising a dead nation from the grave. I should stop briefly to clarify that there is no intentional connection between what I am saying and the fact that Mr. Kennedy is calling his substack American Resurrection, a fact that I just recently became aware of, but I would be lying if I said that I see no significance and maybe even a little hope in his actions, but as far as I know he isn’t deliberately copying me.
This is where it is traditional to exhort and encourage you to be bold for the faith, to stand up and show some backbone, to cast aside your weakness and put on strength, an encouragement that never seems to work. I don’t feel bound to write or preach things that accomplish nothing simply for the sake of seemliness. Moreover, that is not what I find in my text. The Lord does not say that ‘A city set on a hill should not be hidden’ but that it cannot be hidden. You are the city, the temple being built from living stones, and that not of yourselves it is the gift and work of God. Remember well, that Abraham was forbidden to use tools to shape the stones of his altars and no stoneworking tool could be struck when the temple was built. They must be used as they came from the Lord, I am aware that the stones of the temple were quarried but when we consider the sharp limitation that this placed on those fitting the stones together I think that the point is imminently clear. So we must understand, that there is no work which we can do to add to the city, nothing we can do for the kingdom or the temple.
Further, the city is not a nomad camp that might move about, sometimes on a hill sometimes in a valley, rather you are a city that has foundations, the city which Abraham sought:
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born as many as the stars of the sky in multitude—innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.
These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them. Hebrews 11:8—16
That hill is where you are essentially built. You are built on the Hill of Calvary, on death and defeat, on faith that remains faithful even in failure, and though you seem insignificant in your own eyes, the world, the flesh, and the devil are driven to persecute you. As tiny as a grain of salt and to them as irritating as salt in their wounds and light upon them while they skulk in darkness. Might I suggest that if your life doesn’t feel that way, that your feelings may not reflect reality? Have you never considered that when persecuted by the Father of Lies that that persecution might not be open and overt but, dare I say it, clandestine and deceitful? Isn’t it strange that open conflict between the church and the world seems to have disappeared since the building of public schools and the establishment of Departments of Education? You say that you are not in a cistern like Jeremiah but have you noticed that Netflix is pumping a steady stream of raw sewage into your house and Youtube into your children’s faces? Just because you enjoy it on some level doesn’t mean that it isn’t persecution. Don’t you know that witch means twisted and that the worst part of their torture is that part of you craves it? The Nanny state is a Dominatrix state and we may be ashamed of being attracted to parts of it but that doesn’t change reality. June is after all Pride Month, how many blasphemous mockeries of the sign of the covenant have you been tormented with lately?
Perhaps being persecuted has become second nature to you like the frog slowly boiled who doesn’t realize what is happening to him? Don’t you know that the word we usually translate as persecute is literally pursue, but a lion stalking his prey, as we are told the Accuser of the Saints is, is devious and deceitful, does not openly approach and threaten at least not until the end, no the lion begins by hiding from the gazelle showing an occasional sight of himself to keep the prey panicked, he guides the herd by terror to his chosen killing ground, he stresses and panics them, and then he culls the weak. The idea that it is only strong and heroic Christians who make some sort of a stand who are persecuted does not take into account the nature of the persecutor, whether that is a vain hope for you to escape or an irrational fear of your exclusion from the number of the saints either way it is not true. He first makes us weak and separates us from the herd and then culls the weak. Divide and conquer, ‘Strike the shepherd and scatter the sheep’, this is the game plan from Pontius Pilate down to Merrick Garland. You don’t have to do anything special to be persecuted, just live your life and the world, like their father, will not cease to accuse you night and day. I won’t read all of Hebrews 11, but you only need to go about your business like Abel and the Cain’s of this world will come up behind you. Only protect your children, like the parents of Moses, only refuse to be called an Egyptian as Moses did, only receive the Lord’s people with peace and hospitality as Rahab did. Your place and mine is already prepared,
Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. Still others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yes, and of chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented— of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth.
And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us. Hebrews 11:35—40
But let’s finish our text. And fortunately it ends with Unexpected Grace.
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.
Although we often don’t recognize the deceitful persecution that makes us salt and light, in ways that our own actions never can, They, the same They who persecute and revile and slander do taste this saltiness and see this light. I said that you were salt in their wounds and light when they were trying to sneak about and it does infuriate them and drive them to yet more wrath against you. But it does more than that. You see, slaving at the throne of the Beast is not so satisfying that ‘They’ never want something better. We are called to endure persecution for the sake of, for the benefit of the persecutors. Stephen was martyred that he might pray for his persecutors and that that prayer might be answered, for among them was that chosen instrument ‘consenting to his death’ Saul of Tarsus, as I discussed last Pentecost.
The Gate is Narrow and ‘has no form or beauty that we should desire Him’ and yet when the beauty of the face ‘that was marred more than any other’ is seen it can never be unseen, but calls men on to reconciliation with the Father. It is not that He must be reconciled to us, He has long ago hung up His bow in the clouds. And this is the only reason why He is mocked now as He was mocked when He drew all men to Himself. But rather we must be reconciled to Him. It is we who will not put our weapons down. It is we who drag Him to court demanding our dessert and will not accept His gracious offer. The Gate of Heaven may be Narrow but it is not barred against you.
And the Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let him who hears say, “Come!” And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely. Revelation 22:17