THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
Our Lord today continues the teaching begun last week in the “beatitudes” with a direct address to his audience: “YOU are the salt of the earth—YOU are the light of the world”. He does not mean that we should wish to draw attention to ourselves in order to be noticed. But nor does He mean that we should “hide our light under a bushel”, to quote another of His sayings.
As Our Lord’s followers, we must be ready to do all in our power to make Him and His teaching known to those who do not know it, or have only a distorted idea of it.
This is very demanding in a cynical world that believes that Christianity is a spent force. How hard it is to speak up for Christ’s teaching when it has been rejected by our society! It is a daunting prospect. But it is not one we can shun. We still have a duty to make Christ known. St John Henry Newman wrote a wonderful short meditation about this very task—how to think about it, how to approach it and how actually to do it: “Stay with me, [Lord], and then I shall begin to shine as Thou shiniest: so to shine as to be a light to others. The light, O Jesus, will be all from Thee. None of it will be mine. No merit to me. It will be Thou who shiniest through me upon others. O let me thus praise Thee, in the way which Thou dost love best, by shining on all those around me. Give light to them as well as to me; light them with me, through me. Teach me to show forth Thy praise, Thy truth, Thy will. Make me preach Thee without preaching—not by words, but by my example and by the catching force, the sympathetic influence, of what I do—by my visible resemblance to Thy saints, and the evident fullness of the love which my heart bears to Thee.”
In other words, it is easier to do this than we might have thought, so long as we keep constantly in our minds that we are not making ourselves and our own ideas known, but we must make known to others Christ and His teaching. We must be Christ-bearers—images of Him, formed by the Sacraments which are His gift. Christ is the Supreme Teacher of the whole human race, because He alone is both God and man. He is the Creator of the human race since He is God “through whom all things were made”. However, He is also part of creation since “by the power of the Holy Spirit He was incarnate from the Virgin Mary and became man”. ~ Fr. Paul Dobson
