Introduction
I wrote about this text three years ago, and if you’re interested in additional angles on salt, light, and prophetic witness, I’d encourage you to take a look at that earlier commentary as well. Matthew 5:13–20 is rich enough to hold multiple faithful readings, and returning to it over time often reveals new layers.
This week, though, I’m grounding the reflection primarily in verse 17: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.” In Matthew, this line is doing far more than offering clarification. It shapes how the whole Sermon on the Mount is heard and how the church understands its relationship to scripture, tradition, and discipleship today.
Theological and Current Context
Few passages in Matthew’s Gospel have caused more theological confusion (and more harm) than this section of the Sermon on the Mount. Familiar phrases like salt of the earth and light of the world are often lifted out of context and turned into generic encouragements about influence or moral visibility. Meanwhile, verses 17–20 are softened, ignored, or treated as an uncomfortable problem that needs to be explained away.
That instinct itself is telling. And in an age of fly-by influencers and loud virtue signaling, we have even more reason to be careful about how we preach this text. Be the light. Be the salt. Create a new spiritual platform, a catchy phrase, a visible practice to show the world where you stand.
But that is not what this section is about at all. This is not about being a popular influencer or readying ourselves to be noticed. This is not about starting something new or being the freshest idea to generate the most interest and likes. No, this section is all about rooting ourselves in tradition. The tradition of God’s overarching presence and our place in the narrative.
Narrative Context
Matthew does not present Jesus as a religious innovator breaking decisively from tradition. Nor does Matthew imagine the Gospel as a rejection of Israel’s scriptures in favor of something newer or simpler. If anything, Matthew is careful, even insistent, that Jesus be heard as standing firmly within the law and the prophets, not over against them. From the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew anticipates misreadings that would pit Jesus against Torah, grace against law, or Christianity against Judaism. Jesus names and rejects that framing outright.
Matthew 5:13–20 is a critical hinge point in the Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes have just declared blessing in places the world does not expect (among the poor in spirit, the grieving, the persecuted, the merciful). Immediately after those blessings, Jesus turns to identity and continuity, who these people are, and where his teaching stands in relation to Israel’s story.
“You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world.” These are not private spiritual metaphors. They are covenantal and communal claims. Salt preserves and seasons. Light reveals and guides. Both are outward-facing. Both assume relationship with the wider world. And both assume a people already shaped by something deeper than themselves.
That “something deeper” is named explicitly in verse 17:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”
This is not a side clarification. It is Matthew’s interpretive key for everything that follows. The phrasing assumes that such a misunderstanding is not only possible, but likely. Jesus does not simply defend the law and the prophets, he locates himself within them. The Sermon on the Mount is not a rejection of Torah, but a deep reading of it.
In Matthew, “fulfill” does not mean “cancel because completed.” It means to bring to fullness, to draw out the law’s intended depth and trajectory, to embody what the text has always been pointing toward. The verses that follow our pericope (“You have heard it said… but I say to you…”) are not corrections of a failed law, but intensifications that expose the heart of the commandment. Murder includes contempt. Adultery includes objectification. Neighbor-love includes enemy-love. Fulfillment looks like going deeper, not discarding.
This matters not only for historical accuracy, but for the church’s own self-understanding. Supersessionist readings (whether explicit or implied) flatten the Gospel and distort Christian discipleship into something thinner than Matthew intends. What Jesus offers here is not permission to abandon tradition, but a call to inhabit it more deeply.
Read in this light, the metaphors of salt and light are not abstract spiritual images. They are covenantal descriptions of a community shaped by scripture, visible because of its faithfulness, and accountable to a story that did not begin with them. The disciples are not innovators of a brand-new religious ethic detached from Israel’s scriptures. They are participants in an ongoing covenant story. Their “light” is not originality, but faithfulness. Their “saltiness” is not novelty, but integrity.
Even verse 20, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees”, should not be read as dismissal, but as intensification. In Matthew, the problem is not devotion to the law; it is performative righteousness disconnected from mercy and justice. Jesus calls for a righteousness that is not thinner, but thicker, not less Torah-shaped, but more deeply so.
The throughline of this passage is continuity with deepening. And it is on that ground that Jesus commissions his disciples (then and now) to live, speak, and embody a righteousness that goes beyond appearances and into the heart of God’s reign.
Preaching Possibilities
Rooted in God’s Story
Two thousand years later, we are still trying to figure out what it means to inherit the Christian tradition before we try to represent it. That tension is only intensified as Matthew connects the first disciples to an already existing tradition. The Sermon on the Mount presses that tension firmly on us as well. Jesus does not hand his followers a blank slate. He places them inside a story, an ethic, and a way of life that already has depth, memory, and shape. And that invitation extends to us.
For the church today, that means our primary task is not self-expression but formation. Our lives are impacted by the world in real and unavoidable ways, but blessing and identity do not come from there. They come from God. Before we rush to speak, this text calls us to attend to how God is forming us over time, through scripture, tradition, and shared life, so that our words and actions emerge from something deeper. Tradition, in Matthew, is not a constraint on discipleship; it is the soil in which discipleship grows.
We are invited to see ourselves as participants in a communion that stretches backward and forward in time. We inherit prayers we did not write, scriptures we did not choose, practices we did not invent. And in receiving them, we are formed alongside those who worship next to us and those who will come after us. Salt and light, then, are not individual achievements but communal realities. They emerge when we learn how to live faithfully together within a shared story.
The Sermon on the Mount does not call us to preserve the past for its own sake, nor to discard it in search of relevance. Instead, it invites the church to live deeply enough within its tradition that something enduring is handed on. Two thousand years later, our witness is not that we have perfected the tradition, but that we are still being shaped by it, and that shaping, over time, still gives light to the world.
Micah Krey 
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