Homily February 8, 2026, Rev. Holly Cardone

The Fifth Sunday After Epiphany

Matthew 5:13–20

February 7, 2026

A Zealot, a fisherman, and a tax collector walk into a bar… Just kidding. They with 9 others and some women are sitting with Jesus on the side of a mountain. Jesus is teaching them. You are the salt of the earth, Jesus says. If you are a 1st century student of a rabbi who says you are the salt of the earth, you absolutely know what this means. This means you are invaluable. You are important to life, to people, to God. This is no ordinary metaphor. In the first century salt was life. It made bland food edible. It was a preservative for fish and meat. It drew blood out of the meat and fish so that the Jewish people could eat it. Blood being forbidden according to the law.  Salt was used in purification rituals, healing, and cleansing. People depended on salt for all its life giving and purification properties.

Not only that, but salt, a preservative that never decays, was chosen as a seal of the covenant between God and God’s people. Salt is permanent, making the bond between God and God’s people strong and enduring. But if salt ever lost its saltiness, what good does it do. If we forget who we are in Christ, if we forget that we are beloved, made new, forgiven and called, then we lose our saltiness.

You are the light of the world, Jesus says next. You are the light of the world. Just take that in for a moment. Breathe it in. Light is expansive, revealing, guiding, dispelling fear. Light is shared, light guides, light reveals what is hidden. You are the light of the world. The whole world, not just for St. Thomas of Canterbury at the border between Long Beach and Lakewood, but the whole world.

Salt and light, Jesus says, because you are chosen by God, as God’s beloved, to be the light and salt this earth needs. God needs us to be this in the world, no previous job experience required. Just embrace these God given qualities that Jesus declares we all have. Salt enhances flavor of what is already there. God’s people are meant to draw out dignity, truth and goodness in the world and one another. Whatever is corrupting our world, violence, oppression, racism, injustice, we are called to shine a light on it and stand against. We stand again what dehumanizes others. Salt promotes healing, it might sting, but it is essential to wholeness. For the people of the ancient world, salt was essential for survival. In telling his followers they are the salt of the earth, Jesus is saying they are necessary for advancing the kingdom of heaven on earth. And if salt loses its flavor, it is no longer useful. We are vital as the hands and feet of Jesus’s love in the world.

Jesus is reminding his followers what they have already learned from the prophet Isaiah:

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.

Jesus didn’t come to abolish the law and the prophets. He came to turn the hearts and minds of the Jewish people back to them. Deuteronomy 6:5 "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might". And Leviticus 19:18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD."

Rob Bell, in What is the Bible: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything, says:

Abolishing and fulfilling were common ways to speaking about the Torah in Jesus’s day. When people were discussing the Bible and trying to figure out what it looks like to live it out, if someone suggested a terrible or misguided interpretation, they would be told, ‘You have abolished the Torah.’ Or as we night say, ‘That’s missing the point.’ …but if you got it right, ‘yes, that’s what it means. That’s what it looks like to live it out,’ then you would say, ‘You have fulfilled the Torah!’”

Jesus wants us to take everything Isaiah said, and what he says, and bring it to life. We are human beings made in the image of God. God is light, life and love. Bringing all that Jesus showed and taught to all the people who followed him is shining our light in the world. It is retaining our saltiness. In our work, church, families, neighbors, with the stranger, the hungry, the unhoused, those who are suffering in body, mind and spirt, every day, in every encounter we can shine our light. We can fulfill the Torah.

Amen.