Christianity Has Lost Its Way: The Way of Jesus, Part Three.

Salt, light, and the difference between making Christianity visible and making the Way of Jesus visible

This is the third post in The Way of Jesus series, and the feedback so far has been notable.

(If you missed a post, read them here: Post One. Post Two.)

Many of you have messaged me to say that this is exactly the kind of content you need right now—that looking at the earliest memories of Jesus is helping you see him in a new light.

A few readers have been more critical. One suggested that I am clearly still trying to get people to follow Jesus and have simply traded the pulpit for Substack.

I understand the critique. And before we continue, a few things are worth clarifying.

Since my first post here nearly eighteen months ago, I have said that I do not have a preferred destination for your personal beliefs. I am not here to lead you back into Christianity—or out of it. I want this to be a safe place to explore, rethink, question, and doubt—with no predetermined destination.

At the same time, I believe that trying to understand the earliest recoverable versions of Jesus’ message is an important part of deconstruction for anyone coming from an evangelical, fundamentalist, or other conservative Christian background.

Many of us did not fully reject Jesus.

We rejected only the specific version of Jesus we were given.

That does not mean there is another, pristine version waiting beneath the rubble for us to uncover. As I have said throughout this series, we do not know exactly what Jesus said. We have the memories of his followers, written down decades after his death and already developing in different directions. We are doing educated guesswork, and there will never be a final, perfectly certain answer.

But before deciding what, if anything, the Way of Jesus means to us now, I think it is worth asking what his earliest followers remembered that way to be. You are free to embrace it, reject it, adapt it, or simply find it interesting.

I have also been honest that I do currently identify as a Christian—although a very different kind of Christian than I once was. The story of Jesus still holds a kind of centrality for me. It would be impossible, and probably dishonest, to divorce that entirely from my work here.

I am not trying to persuade you to believe what I believe. But I also cannot write honestly while pretending I have no beliefs of my own.

So yes, there may be moments when my continuing affection for Jesus shows. There will also be moments when I question whether Jesus said what the Gospels claim he said—or whether what he said was wise, good, or worth following. (The next article coming up after this one is an example of that.)

The purpose of this series is not to preach Jesus so that you can believe in him.

It is to look again at the Way of Jesus before finalizing what we think of it.

To do that we are using the Sermon on the Mount as a starting point.

Which brings us to…

Immediately after the Beatitudes, Matthew has Jesus say:

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

—Matthew 5:13–16

If you grew up evangelical, you probably already have an interpretation of this passage.

Being “salt and light” meant telling people about Jesus. It meant being visibly Christian—bringing your Bible to school and praying at the flagpole. It meant standing up for “biblical" values in a sinful culture. Depending on the church, it may also have meant avoiding certain movies, music, language, relationships, or political positions so that people could see how different Christians were.

Eventually, “salt and light” became part of the culture-war vocabulary.

Christians were supposed to influence society, reclaim institutions, vote the right way, and prevent the moral decay of the nation.

But is that what Matthew is describing?

Versions of these images appear elsewhere in the Gospels. The salt saying is found in Mark 9:50 and Luke 14:34–35. The image of a lamp being hidden beneath a container appears in Mark 4:21, Luke 8:16, and Luke 11:33.

That suggests these sayings circulated among early followers of Jesus, although we cannot know precisely when Jesus said them, what their original context was, or whether he ever placed salt and light together.

But, Matthew does put them together.

More importantly, Matthew places them immediately after the Beatitudes.

That creates a progression:

1. These are the people who are fortunate.

2. This is what their presence in the world will do.

N.T. Wright, for instance, sees the Sermon on the Mount as a vision of the kingdom becoming visible through the kinds of people Jesus has just described: the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, and those hungering for justice.

The kingdom does not arrive through domination. It begins appearing through a community practicing a different way of being human.

Whether this arrangement goes back to Jesus or was shaped by Matthew, it tells us something important about what at least one early community believed the Way of Jesus meant.

Jesus does not say:

“Let your light shine so that people will hear your correct beliefs.”

He says:

“Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds.”

The light is a way of living that other people can see.

And because Matthew places this directly after the Beatitudes, those “good deeds” cannot be separated from what Jesus has just described: mercy, peacemaking, hunger for justice, solidarity with those who suffer, and faithfulness in the face of persecution.

The people Jesus calls salt and light are not powerful religious leaders. They are the poor in spirit, the grieving, the meek, and the persecuted.

This is not a vision of Christians controlling the world in any sort of traditional way.

It is a vision of unlikely people living as though another world is possible.

Exactly what Jesus meant by salt remains uncertain. Salt had several uses in the ancient world. It added flavor, preserved food, and appeared in religious and covenant practices.

Perhaps the metaphor is intentionally broad.

Whatever else salt does, it changes what it touches. It has an effect without becoming the entire meal.

That feels very different from the version of Christian influence many of us were given.

We were taught that faithfulness meant gaining power, controlling institutions, passing laws, and making the culture more Christian. But salt does not need to dominate everything around it to matter. A relatively small amount can change the character of the whole.

Mercy changes a community.

Peacemaking interrupts retaliation.

Generosity loosens the grip of scarcity.

Enemy-love refuses the endless demand to divide the world into us and them.

The same is true of light.

Light makes things visible. A spotlight makes the person standing beneath it the center of attention.

That distinction becomes especially interesting when we continue reading Matthew. Here, Jesus says to let people see your good deeds. In the next chapter, he warns against practicing righteousness “in front of others to be seen by them.”

So which is it? Should good deeds be visible or hidden?

The difference appears to be who receives the attention.

In Matthew 5, people see the good and glorify God. In Matthew 6, religious performers make sure people see their goodness so that they themselves will be admired.

Jesus is not describing spiritual branding. He is imagining a radical way of life whose effects become difficult to hide, like a city on a hill.

Then comes the warning:

“If the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?”

Many of us were taught that we lost our saltiness when we started questioning Christianity.

When we doubted the Bible.

When we changed our beliefs about hell, gender, sexuality, salvation, or the church.

When we stopped trying to convert everyone around us.

When we could no longer say that we were certain.

But what if doubt is not what makes salt lose its taste?

What if Christianity loses its saltiness when it no longer produces mercy, peacemaking, justice, generosity, reconciliation, and love?

A religion can retain its buildings, institutions, doctrines, money, political influence, and cultural power while becoming almost unrecognizable from the Way of Jesus described in the Sermon on the Mount.

It can remain very visibly Christian while making the Way of Jesus nearly impossible to see.

That is not necessarily the only historical meaning of Jesus’ warning, but it is a fair question we can bring to the text now.

And for those of us who were told that our honest questions made us compromised, worldly, or useless to God, it may be a question worth asking.

Perhaps we did not begin losing our saltiness when we started questioning Christianity. Perhaps questioning Christianity was part of our attempt to discover whether it still tasted anything like Jesus.

A lot of us carry baggage around evangelism.

We were told to tell people about Jesus. Make them believe. Get them to church. Convince them to say a prayer so that they could be saved.

What is interesting about the Sermon on the Mount is that there is none of that.

There is no formula for converting someone. No instruction to win an argument. No pressure to get people to adopt a new belief system.

Instead, Matthew has Jesus telling his followers to become salt and light. And in the context of the sermon, that appears to mean actively loving one another, caring for those in need, making peace, practicing mercy, and even loving their enemies.

This is consistent with another early Christian memory found in the Gospel of John:

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

—John 13:35

John does not say they will recognize Jesus’ disciples by their doctrine, certainty, political influence, or ability to defend their faith.

They will know by their love.

We find a similar vision in Acts, the second volume of Luke’s story. Luke gives us an almost utopian portrait of the first community of Jesus followers in Acts 2. They shared their possessions, sold property to care for anyone in need, ate together, and opened their homes to one another.

We cannot know how completely the historical community lived up to this ideal. But the portrait tells us what Luke believed the movement was supposed to be.

Then Luke adds two fascinating details. This community enjoyed “the favor of all the people,” and people were being added to their number every day.

The followers of the Way did not grow because they developed a better evangelism program. According to Luke’s story, people saw a community of radical generosity and love—and wanted to become part of it.

People are drawn to light on a hill.

They are not argued into a new belief system. They see love. They experience love. And then they want in.

That appears to be the Way of Jesus’ growth strategy.

Become the kind of community whose mercy, generosity, peacemaking, and enemy-love are impossible to ignore.

In other words, live in such a way that another world becomes visible from a distance.

This does not mean that no early Christian ever attempted to persuade anyone. Obviously, they did. But persuasion was not supposed to compensate for the absence of a compelling way of life.

Once evangelism becomes a program designed to convince people that there is light somewhere they cannot actually see, something has gone wrong.

Once evangelism becomes a program…

We have lost the Way.

Literally.

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