Companion pieces: Love Your Enemies — What Psalm 68 Will Not Let You Do, on the same chapter from the other side, and A Place for Salt, on what salt is left for. The article Seeking came out of this reading.
My devotion this morning was Matthew five and six.
Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.
Nine of them, and eight run the same way. Those. A description of a kind of person, held at arm's length, and I have always read them as a portrait gallery — here is what God's people look like, see whether you can find yourself among them.
Then verse eleven changes.
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
I've never seen that before. You.
Not those. And it doesn't go back.
In my Bible there is a heading after verse twelve. Salt and Light. Bold type, a line of space above it, and a new section starting at thirteen.
It isn't in Matthew. The headings were put in by editors, and they are a kindness most of the time — they help you find things.
Take it out and read straight through.
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you… for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. You are the salt of the earth.
There is no break there. The same you carries across.
And the line I'd always skipped sits between them.
For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Before you. It puts them in a line, and it names who else is in it. Not the well-regarded ones. The prophets were not the flavour of Israel's religious life. They were the ones who were run out of town.
That is the company the you has just been given. And the next thing said to them is that they are the salt of the earth.
You are the salt of the earth.
Salt keeps things. Before refrigeration that was its work — you salted meat so it would still be meat next month. It is not a decoration. It is what stops the rot.
You are the light of the world.
And the you is the same you. The reviled, the slandered, the ones in the line of the prophets.
So the preservative is not the church at its most comfortable. It is the church at its most cost.
We say this verse about ourselves. We are the salt of the earth. I have said it from a pulpit in a country where saying it costs nothing at all.
I'm not so sure now that I'd make the same claim.
I had just turned forty when I went to Vietnam. We flew into Hanoi from Hong Kong with Bibles, and met with people from the underground church there. But Hanoi was the way in. The reason I had gone was Saigon, to see a young woman working there, and to be some use to her if I could.
Everyone still called it Saigon.
She took me around the city on the back of her motorbike. I remember holding onto her waist as we went through the traffic, and I remember that she was watching. Not frightened. Watching. She knew which meetings had been sat in on, and she knew how you speak to someone you have not met before — not the way we do it at home, where we advertise and hope people come. There, being found out was the cost of being known.
The church there grew.
I flew home.