• Isaiah 58: 1-9a, (9b-12)

The text of the Book of Isaiah turns to a scathing indictment of the perversion (“rebellion”) of the purported faithfulness of God’s people.  The self-serving, self-aggrandizing religious customs and practices that humankind chooses “will not make your voice heard on high.”  The Lord chooses a different spiritual discipline  (“fast”)– “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke,” “to share your bread with the hungry….”  “Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer….”  The text now adds some additional changes in behavior the Lord desires– remove “the pointing of the the finger, the speaking of evil”–as precursors to a new role for God’s people–“you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.”

• Psalm 112: 1-9, (10)

The psalmist describes the attributes of a ‘hero’ to family, to heritage, and to community as one who “shows grace” and backs up words with deeds of justice.

• I Corinthians 2: 1-12, (13-16)

Paul characterizes himself not as someone who offers “lofty words or wisdom,” but as a man weak “and in fear and in much trembling,” except when it comes to declaring his testimony about “Jesus Christ, and him crucified” as “a demonstration of the Spirit and of the power,” so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom, but on the power of God.”  He is a witness not to conventional wisdom, but to “God’s wisdom….”  He empowers his readers not in the “spirit” of any passing age, but in “the Spirit that searches everything, even the depths of God.”  This is “foolishness” to some, but nothing less than “the mind of Christ” to others.

• Matthew 5: 13-20

Having just provided a manifesto/precis/revelation of Jesus’ teaching , (see last Sunday’s comments), Matthew’s text now addresses those who have been privileged to hear/experience it: “You are the salt of the earth….”  “You are the light of the world.”  But if salt looses its “saltiness,” it is tossed out.  And, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket, but on the lamp stand, and it gives light to the whole house.”  The point is clear as day: “let your light so shine before others” in your deeds.  Only Matthew then follows with words of Jesus that stress the continuity of his teaching with the Torah and the prophets, which he came “not to abolish,” but to fulfill.”  His followers are to fulfill all past expectation and then exceed them in practice!

Isaiah’s attack on conventional religion dismisses not only the practices themselves, but the motives of those who use them to create an image of piety.  God chooses one spiritual discipline above all others– the work of justice/ freedom, including any and all actions that result in the tangible relief of those in need; or to put it another way, any actions that make public life in the streets safer and more productive, according to Isaiah.  The psalmist instructs that the person who is graceful and whose words are fulfilled in actual deeds of justice is an asset to family and community and leaves a worthy heritage.  For all the caricatures of Matthew’s gospel as more ‘spiritualized’ than Mark or Luke, the emphasis in today’s excerpt is definitely on specific “deeds,” specific actions of kindness/charity/justice that are like “salt” or “light.”

In the essay “On the Name,” in which Jacques Derrida chose to discuss in detail what he did and did not mean by his much misunderstood, central concept, “deconstruction,” he includes an articulate, deeply sympathetic interpretation of the writings of St. Augustine, particularly his Confessions.  Derrida writes of Augustine’s understanding of confession not as an exercise in reporting to God what God already knows, but in personally appropriating  (“confessing” in a different sense), the message and the intent of the gospel:

“When he [St. Augustine] asks (himself), when he asks in truth of God and already of his readers why he confesses himself to God when He [sic] knows everything, the response makes it appear that what is essential to the avowal or the testimony does not consist in an experience of knowledge.  Its act is not reduced to informing, teaching, making known.  Stranger to knowing, thus to every determination or to every predicative attribution, confession shares [partage] this destiny with the apophatic movement.  Augustine’s response is inscribed from the outset in the Christian order of love or charity or fraternity.”  “Augustine speaks of ‘doing the truth’ (veritatem facere), which does not come down to revealing, unveiling, nor to informing in order of cognitive reason.  Perhaps it comes down to testifying.”  

This sense of “confessing” results in “doing the truth,” which means only one thing–justice/charity!  Explicitly Derrida writes:“this conversion turns (itself) towards the other in order to turn (it) to God without there being an order of the two movements that are in truth the same….(pp 38-39)

Faithfulness to God is fulfilled, it is fully commensurate with, indeed it is only authentic when it “turns (itself) toward the other….”  Above all spiritual disciplines, Isaiah tells us, God chooses justice.  In Paul’s’ vocabulary, this is “God’s wisdom;” it reveals “the mind of Christ,”  who testified with his own words and deeds to God’s priorities.  Those who choose justice are those who heal/restore/preserve/cleanse/flavor their communities like “salt;”  these are the deeds that bring “light” everywhere they shine.  People pour into the streets, which are safe and bustling with activities and together build a just, a fair human community.  This is “doing the truth.”

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the Duke taunts the Puritan, Angelo, for not practicing his piety as tangible actions in human community:

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do

Not light them for themselves;  for if our virtues

Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike

As if we had them not.

It is only when whatever “virtues” we can muster happen that “light” spreads.  God’s people “restore” the “breaches” in society.  The streets are safe for all.  Community flourishes.  The gospel is done in public!  God’s people “do the truth.”