Fifth Sunday after Epiphany; 5 February 2023; Epiphany 5A (RCL); Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 112:1-9; 1 Corinthians 2:1-12; Matthew 5:13-21.
Chapter 58 of Isaiah is one of those clarion passages that depict the righteous society envisioned by the prophets as fulfillment of Torah. It seems to be set against the events of the return from Exile, with Jerusalem in ruins. There is apparently a contest with the returnees for how best to reestablish the righteous society. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah give us a hint about this contest. Isaiah is all for opening the Temple to the nations, while Ezra/Nehemiah wants to constrain membership in the new community to those who can show ancestry among the Exiles.
I have to admit I find Isaiah’s vision much more compelling than that of Ezra/Nehemiah. The Book of Ruth also seems to be a response to Ezra/Nehemiah, with its enforced divorce of foreign women. Chapter 58 carries echos of the passage from Micah we heard last week. And while Ezra calls for a fast, Isaiah suggests a different form of fasting to be pleasing to God. Repairing the breach and restoring streets to live in would seem much more doable with a happy mix of people, than with an ethnically narrow group.
It is unfortunate that English does not distinguish between second person singular and plural. You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world can too easily be read in the second person singular (this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine). Both of these sentences are in the plural. You all are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, the community you establish (along the lines of Isaiah 58?) will attract the world. That’s what the prophet has said two chapters earlier (Isaiah 56 — the nations will stream to Zion).
I think that is what the last sentence in the reading of the Gospel means — unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. And I don’t mean the scribes and pharisees of ancient times. The Gospels caricature the scribes and pharisees as the heirs of Ezra/Nehemiah (an unfair caricature, but understandable given the struggle the Christian communities were in for their lives against their Jewish siblings). The righteousness of the Christian community has to look to the universal rather than the particular.
Paul stresses that again and again in his letters. The flesh is the arena in which we make distinctions (male/female, slave/free, Jew/Greek, etc.), while the Spirit is the arena in which those distinctions are subsumed under the righteousness of Christ. When we are baptized into Christ’s death, we die to the flesh and its distinctions, and are raised into newness of life in the Spirit.
It is this new community and its way of life (laid out in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount) that is the salt of the earth, and the light of the world. A city built on a hill (Zion) cannot be hid, and its repaired breach and restored streets illuminate the rest of the world.