(Read this series from its beginning at Part 1 and Part 2.)
There is also another truth to what Jesus is saying here. Too often, Christians have taken for granted that they are the light of the world when they have in fact called for the exclusion of those unlike them. Whether it be with the banning of Muslims, the silencing of women’s voices, Black voices pushed aside by White supremacy, the poor marginalized by the rich, or those who belong to the LGBTQ community excluded by Christians—yes, there are exceptions, but some Christians have spent the last several years making the loudest calls for certain voices and certain stories to be pushed to the margins.
Again, when anyone’s voice, anyone’s story is shut out from Jesus’ shared table, the absence of those voices will harm us all. The excluded and marginalized in every situation are Jesus’ “light” that must be brought back. When Christians exclude and marginalize, they cease to be “light.” It would be well for those who have historically claimed to be the “light of the world” to listen to Jesus’ words here.
The community to which Jesus is speaking is one whose theism, morality, and ethics had been shaped through the interpretations of the Torah and the social elite. To get through to the people, Jesus must first disturb their confidence in these interpretations. Repeatedly in the sermon on the mount Jesus points out the inadequacy of the approved teachings. In verse 17, Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. ‘Fullfil’in this verse is pleroo, which means to complete or to make more full. In the very next verse Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” The word for “accomplished” is ginomai and also means “to complete.”
In American civil mythology, we often use the phrase, a “more perfect union.” I was struck during the January 21 inauguration by these words in Amanda Gorman’s poem: “It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit, it’s the past we step into and how we repair it.”
We have much to repair, not only from the last four years, but also from the last four hundred years, and reparations is the watch word. From reparations to Earth in the midst of a sixth major extinction event to reparations to the descendants of enslaved people upon whose backs US wealth still grows; reparations to first Americans whose land is still being threatened, and to migrants unjustly treated to preserve a White majority in the U.S.; reparations to poor, rural Americans whose few resources get redistributed, too, to those who already have so much—we have much to repair, and now is the time to begin.
Jesus invites us to step into a way of viewing our own well-being as deeply connected with the well-being of everyone in our society.
If Jesus’ disinherited listeners were to experience liberation, it would be because they overcame injustice together. No more exclusion of those marginalized as other. Jesus’ new social order, God’s just future, or what the text refers to as ‘the kingdom’, is a world where all oppression, injustice, and violence is put right, internally and externally, privately and publicly, individually and collectively.
So now is a moment for us to begin again. We can exhale deep relief from the political transition we have just witnessed. And we can take up the work once again, of pushing a new, diverse administration toward policies and systemic change that help make our world a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone.
We still have work to do, not only to ensure past harms do not repeat, but also to ensure that the future does not return us to the normality of the past.
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