nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Your light must shine before people in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.
Matthew 5:15-16 (NASB)
This slight pair of sentences, which to boot start with a comic observation, in fact contain deep, sobering truths about the Kingdom Christ was announcing. I’m going to unpack just part of it here.
To start with, much to my alarm as an introvert, it anticipates social media TMI[1] by a couple thousand years. Jesus tells his followers to live their belief in public. The Faith is not intended to be private. Its purpose, as stated here, is not just to be saved, to become intimate with God, nor even to publicly defend Christianity and its perceived values against the World. The purpose is for others to get a good impression of the God one worships from one’s beautiful (kala in Greek) actions.
Some elaboration of “good works” is needed here. It’s a solid translation from both Greek and Aramaic records. However, we know that Jesus elsewhere commands that one keep one’s ritual observations (fasting, offerings, almsgiving, prayer) private[2]. I would say that we also get an important clue in how most people, including non-disciples, would form a near-consensus on approving the sort of actions he had in mind. Hence, we’re not talking doctrine or tradition or cultural chauvinism or anything else that might disrupt civility.
I think the cases at the start of the account attributed to Mark are great examples. Even then, there were a few (very religious) people that said that those healings, deliverances, or pardons came from the devil, but the popular consensus was that these are good things. I would generalize to say that Jesus had in mind any action that demonstrates love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, or self-control. Such things are manifestly not of the devil, so should not be prohibited.
Which brings us to the difficult part of this meditation: the application. I ask the same sort of questions that I asked in Bad News in the Gospel: do the faith things you do before the public, on Twitter or Facebook, demonstrate the things I listed above? Do they cause most everyone around you to think well of the God you say you worship?
Confession time for me: the logic of my position on fetuses descends from the assumption that they are human beings, but I’ve never marched. Perhaps to the contrary, I’ve gone with a friend that needed the support to get an abortion – and spent the entire time in the Planned Parenthood lobby crying out before God. That’s what kindness and faithfulness told me to do.
That was a great sadness, but I have to say, there’s another. A lot of what I think are intended as faith actions (many of them memes) run counter to Christ’s command here. They not only fail to move the World to glorify God but achieve the opposite. And it’s not always unintentional; some believers seem to glory in hostility and call it holy and war. To me, that’s not what the picture of the warm glow of an oil lamp giving light to all in the room illustrates. It wasn’t a Greek Fire flamethrower, for God’s sake! Even if it were possible to interpret that word picture as a war between light and darkness, it is much more difficult to subvert Christ’s explanation following. So to me, such demonstrations are not the Light. Right now, as I try to draw near to Christ’s heart over his intent in these verses for his Church, I can go only so far, because the sadness starts to overwhelm me.
[1] To Much (Personal) Information
[2] Matthew 6