Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, 5:13-20, Matthew 5:13-20

Vivian Lewin, Spiritual Director in the Diocese of Montreal

(You can listen to this sermon here.)

“For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to [be instructed]?”
But we have the mind of Christ. (I Corinthians 16)

And what is this mind?

This morning’s Gospel reading, from Matthew, is taken from Chapter 5 and follows immediately after Matthew’s account of the Beatitudes. We would have heard them last Sunday, except that we were most wonderfully observing the Feast of Candlemas… when the infant Jesus was brought into the Temple and greeted by both Simeon and Anna.

So now, we have encompassed, in the space of just one week, thirty years in the life of Jesus: He has been baptised, tempted in the wilderness, come to Galilee, called his first disciples, cured people, attracted crowds, and he is now preaching in Galilee, delivering a major teaching, the collection we call the Sermon on the Mount, dealing with God’s will and God’s reign–described in terms which position this reign in sharp contrast with the Roman imperial regime that prizes power, wealth, and status.

We could spend a year just on the Beatitudes, couldn’t we? “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Don’t we yearn for that, these days? For a different “world order” or perhaps an unworldly order? How do we get from here to there?

Isaiah calls Israel to account, even after the return from Exile. God’s promise, he prophesizes, will come not to those who perform religious rituals but to those who do the works of mercy. “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers. You fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.”

But listen: Jesus doesn’t tell his disciples “you need to become like salt”.. He doesn’t say “you need to become light.”

He tells them “you ARE the salt of the earth.” “you are the light of the world.” How can this be?

First, I think it’s important to say that this is not a matter of individual piety and spiritual striving or achievement. This is part of who we are, a quality that’s true right now, one we can lay hold of together as a community or a family.

Do you recall that in our baptism liturgy, we give the child a lit candle (if its little hand can safely hold it) or give the candle to the parents, and say “receive the light of Christ”? The light we already have–the light we ARE– is standard equipment, conferred by membership in Christ even to little ones who don’t yet comprehend what it is.

As I was pondering this, I remembered a friend telling me that when her two children were really little (they now have children of their own and they are phenomenal parents) that to her, each of them was perfect at every age. She didn’t spend time waiting for them to turn into a more advanced version of themselves, she appreciated exactly who they were in the moment.

I have to confess that this was like a foreign language to me. I was the kid who loved piling one colour of wax crayon over the next, scribbling wildly, and getting bad marks in class, until my parents persuaded a “real” artist… a friend of theirs who painted in watercolour ,to come over for dinner and then show me how to keep my colour within the outlines on the sheets the teacher handed us out to complete in class.

So when I first came to read the scriptures, you can imagine that I understood them as a blueprint for how to measure up. Striving. Judging. Falling short. This week it occurred to me that I had been missing the point.

Now, the Bible is, among other things, instruction in the faith, yes. There’s a lot of admonition, and good and bad examples of behaviour. Sin. Slip sliding away, yes, it’s all too easy to turn the spiritual life itself into one more form of performance anxiety. To turn our New Years resolutions, perhaps already neglected, into Lenten discipline (coming up just after the Pancake Orgy).

But the Beatitudes aren’t commandments. They are blessings. Affirmations that turn worldly expectations upside down. (Note 1).

When Bertrand preached last Sunday on Candlemas, he described it as the point in the Christian Year when we begin to move from Recognition to Vocation.

Jesus was recognized when he was still a babe in arms. He grows into his calling. And if we know one thing about him, underneath all the complexities of translations and the variability of the written accounts, it is that his call was so strong that it still echoing around the world through two millennia, extending to who all who are open to it, even strong enough to overcome Paul, that apostle “lately born” and fills him with the desire to be baptised and then to carry the Good News to cities all around the Mediterranean. That call was strong enough to break the power of sin and death. We will discover that together, as we enter the pilgrimage of Lent and walk with Jesus to the cross and beyond.

His calling was rooted in the transformative and prophetic message passed down in the Hebrew scriptures… not as we sometimes misunderstand it, as a legalistic and punitive code of behaviour, but as the root of a new way for people to live together.

As we heard read from Isaiah: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”

My dear friends, “let those who have ears, hear!” (Matthew 13:9): You. Are. Salt. You. Are. Light.

You and I have been called, each in our own way, to give something absolutely essential to the world. By myself I can’t do much. None of us can, really. Salt might be the smallest of all the ingredients in a dish, but it brings out all the other flavours. And the people who are being called… in Matthew it’s first the apostles, Galileans standing on the hill overlooking the lake… and then by extension the readers of the Gospel… including us… here this morning… we are not unequipped to be called. Not waiting to be ready. We’re simply starting where we are. Because we are already exactly who we are. Authentic in ourselves. Not faking it. This is always, exactly, where prayer and where life together needs to begin.

Not because we’re perfect! Remember (Luke 5:8) Peter falling at Jesus feet and saying “Depart from me, I am a sinner.” Remember Pope Francis’ first words after he was elected, saying “Please pray for me I am a sinner”. We are all works in progress. AND we are also salt and light.

The kingdom itself is, like us, a work in progress–more than a prediction, and less than finished. Raymond Brown writes: “The salvific preaching and works of Jesus are more than portents of the reign of God; the reign is present and operative in them. Yet the reign is not established and is not fully realized; this is to come.” (Note 2).

How is this to come about?

I read a column by Anne Lamott yesterday, she described how completely played out she has been these past weeks and then remembers seeing a little girl whose mother had just died, and who was at the beach. There were some baby octopi (or octopuses) that had been stranded, clinging to the pilings of a pier after the tide had gone out, and the child was methodically, maybe compulsively, prying them off one at a time and running down to the water’s edge to throw them into the waves. Her grandmother said “Honey, stop. You’re just exhausting yourself. That won’t make any difference.” The child said: “it makes a difference to the octopus.”

My dear friends, let your light shine.

Amen

Scripture passages for February 8, 2026, the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany:
Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, 5:13-20, Matthew 5:13-20

1. Consider that “Blessed” is the very first word in the Book of Psalms.
2. Quoted from Raymond Brown’s review in Theological Studies (Vol 25, no. 2, 1964) of God’s Rule and Kingdom, by Rudolph Schnackenburg, Herder & Herder (transl. John Murray). 1963.