Welcome back, brother or sister, to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ. This will be the most exhaustive, intensive, comprehensive gospel study you've ever read by the time we are finished here. We're on pace to complete this study in... well... quite a number of years. So sit back and relax and let the data wash over you.
If you desire to start from the beginning, you can find the introductory posting to this writing here.
For the last two weeks, you'll recall, we've been learning about the Similes of Salt and Light. These "similes" represent the first data that Jesus relays to his followers in the form of a metaphor. Jesus, as a philosopher, seemed to have been quite prone to metaphor and parable. This will become more and more apparent to us as we move forward.
Like we've done for the last couple of weeks, we are going to forgo any superfluous research here so that we can stay focused directly on our gospel text. If nothing else, this is for my personal benefit. The Similes of Salt and Light have been, in the past, challenging for me to understand clearly, so I want to make sure that we've really thought these through.
Let me not ramble on any more. We'll get started.
Matthew 5:15 through Matthew 5:16
15 Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house.
16 Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.
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Recall that Jesus is currently relaying the first parts of what is known as his "Sermon on the Mount." He is standing, we believe, by himself, on an elevated spot overlooking a "great crowd." The crowd has come to him because he is proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, and because he appears to have some kind of ability to cure or ease some of the frailties or illnesses in the people.
The crowd he speaks to is described as large, and all of the crowd are described collectively as disciples. Since Jesus speaks here to a large, anonymous crowd, authoritatively doling out moral data to them, we can assume that these data are for the general public. That is to say that the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are for the common follower of Christ, not for a select group of elite followers such as the Twelve Apostles.
I will repeat that: the Sermon on the Mount is not for the elite or seasoned follower of Christ. It is for the common Christian. It is for every Christian.
Last time, Jesus told the crowd before him that they were the "light of the world." Today, he continues with the "light" metaphor. In 5:15, he states the obvious: people don't light a candle and then put it under an obscuring cover. If you light a lamp and put it under a basket, the flame will not light the room, and will possibly burn out rapidly for lack of air - a pointless exercise. To the contrary, he says, a lamp, once lit, is placed on a lampstand, where it can "give light to all in the house."
In 5:16, Jesus tells his followers that, just like a lamp on a lampstand, their light must shine before others, so that "they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father."
There is a deceptively large amount to cover here. First, we'll talk about the linguistics of the word "light" as it occurs in these verses. Then, we'll discuss the way Jesus' use of the word "light" here compares to his use of the word "light" in the Gospel According to John. Finally, we'll talk about the word "must," which Jesus speaks here for the first time, and which marks out critical moral data or instruction.
Linguistics
The word "light" appears three times here:
- "...they light a lamp,"
- "...it gives light to all," and
- "...your light must shine."
Reading these verses in their original Greek, one would find not three repetitions of the same term, but three distinct terms. For our understanding, we will take a look at each of these Greek terms.
The second word we have, from "...it gives light to all," is "lampó." "Lampó" is the Greek verb equivalent to the English "to shine," "to glow," or even "to sparkle." It is, fairly obviously, a deep root to the modern English word "lamp."
The third version of "light" we want to look at is the one represented in 5:16. The use of "light" in 5:16 comes from the Greek "phós." "Phós" represents radiant light, illuminating energy, and can even be related to the term "beacon."
Three distinct Greek terms, "kaió," "lampó," and "phós" get funnelled into one English word: "light."
Knowing the Greek roots of these words doesn't necessarily augment our understanding of these verses, but it does demonstrate how one-dimensional the English translation of the ancient Greek can sometimes be. This highlights the importance, for us, of going all the way back to the original Greek as often as possible. It goes without saying that when multiple terms get crushed into one term through the process of translation, we lose some of the subtlety and nuance of the original text.
It should go without saying, too, that subtlety and nuance are manna to you and I.
Light of the World: Matthew's Version, or John's?
Now I'd like to call attention to a verse from the Gospel According to John. In John ch. 8, we read the following:
12 Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Did you do a double take? You should have. Let's revisit what Jesus said in Matthew 5:14. Speaking to a huge crowd of anonymous followers, in Matthew 5:14, Jesus said the following:
14 "You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden."In Matthew, Jesus elevates and bolsters his followers, who are constituted by a crowd of unwashed, anonymous, middle-eastern humans. He tells them explicitly that they are the "light of the world." In John, Jesus never says such a thing. In John, for some reason, Jesus has totally changed his mind on this "light of the world" issue. In John, Jesus says that he is the light of the world.
(The Greek word translated as "light" in the Johannine* verse here is, again, "phós," meaning "radiant light" or "illuminating energy.")
The phrasing from Matthew seems to contradict the phrasing from John. How can Jesus' followers be "the light of the world" if Jesus himself is "the light of the world?" What can we understand about Jesus' teachings from this apparent conceptual contradiction?
It seems to me that the Jesus we've seen so far in Matthew is both selfless and humble. He humbly accepted the baptism of another human, John the Baptist. He selflessly counsels and heals the multitudes. He idealizes humble human characteristics in his Beatitudes, and he tells his humble followers that they are both wonderful and consequential.
Smash-cut to Jesus in the Gospel of John, who, as we will eventually see, is totally stripped of his humble airs. The Jesus in John states that he is wonderful and consequential, and that his followers better believe that he is God, "or else."
Whenever we compare the gospels to one another, it is imperative to look at their relative dating. The Gospel of John was the last one to be written, and would have been composed between sixty and eighty years after the death of Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew was composed as early as forty years after Jesus' death. Empirically speaking, then, the Gospel of Matthew carries more weight for us in the realm of the "historical Jesus," because there was literally less time for Christ's message to become diluted prior to its composition. For this reason we will generally assume that, between two contradictory gospel excerpts, the oldest one is the more accurate.
That said, what we see happening here before our very eyes, between Matt ch. 5 and John ch. 8, is the deliberate alteration of the moral teaching of Jesus Christ over time by human writers.
I'll repeat that: since Matthew 5:14-16 contradicts John 8:12, and since John was written upwards of decades after Matthew was written, we know that someone changed or added to the words of Jesus as they had been passed along from the earliest sources. We know that the Jesus appearing in John is qualitatively different from the Jesus appearing in Matthew, and we know that those differences were engineered by humans.
That's quite a bombshell for us. I'd like you to keep this concept near and dear throughout the duration of our study.
The gospels do not always agree in their portrayal of the morality of Jesus, and it is a Christian's responsibility to parse through these differences with a skeptical eye, if they are to be as close as possible to The Man.
Pay Attention to the "Musts"
To conclude, today, I want to call attention to another particular word. That word is "must."
First, a bit of background.
In an earlier version of my life, afflicted by unmanageable addiction, I availed myself of the Twelve-Step programs for relief. The Twelve-Step programs are, like the Abrahamic religions, very literature-driven. There are various books, workbooks, and inspirational compilation texts available in the major Twelve-Step programs, and the intimate study of those texts is critical to the sobriety and longevity of many of the Twelve-Steps' adherents.
I was guided through some of the Twelve-Step literature for a time by a strong man who always told me to pay special attention to the "musts" in said literature.
"I want you to go through the book and highlight every instance of the word "must" that you find," he told me. "You always have to pay attention to the 'musts.'"
What he meant was that the literature at hand offered a lot of ideas and a lot of advice, but that a small percentage of those ideas or that advice was qualified by the word "must." My sponsor meant merely to point out that when someone goes to the trouble to say or write the word "must," it is because they want to convey the absolute criticality of a thing. If the text said that we "must" do something, then it wasn't a "suggestion," it was an absolutely critical requisite to success in sobriety.
I believe that my sponsor's wisdom about the word "must" carries over to our study of the gospel.
Jesus says: "your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father."
Not "might shine." Not "could shine." Not "should shine."
"Must shine."
Unless we find a contradiction to this statement in the older Gospel of Mark (which we won't), we will be taking this statement, henceforth, as an unequivocal command. A follower of Jesus must be an illuminating light to the world through their good actions.
Isolation and inaction, then, are true enemies of the good of Jesus. The practising follower of Christ will be justified by the light they spread on earth by their works, not by some quiet, personal profession of faith in impossibilities they never witnessed.**
A follower of Christ must shine.
Shine on.
Love.
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* Johannine means "relating to, or of, John the Evangelist."
** The Gospel of John will proceed to contradict all of this, too. Again, we will chalk that up to human error or deliberate human meddling, and err on the side of The Synoptics.
** The Gospel of John will proceed to contradict all of this, too. Again, we will chalk that up to human error or deliberate human meddling, and err on the side of The Synoptics.
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