Jesus and Judaism - Reflections on Matthew 5:13-20, Epiphany 5, Year A
by John C. Holbert on Tuesday, November 25, 2025
I have noted several times during my essays on the Gospel of Matthew that Matthew was rather obviously speaking to an audience made up primarily of Jews, attempting to prove to them that the life that Jesus lived and the content of his teaching were in the main a Jewish life lived by that Jewish teaching. As we witnessed last week in our discussion of the Beatitudes, these famous aphorisms are neither general philosophical statements nor lists of sectarian ethics, but are thoroughly Jewish both in form and in content. Those who constituted the “new Israel” of Matthew’s day were taught about just how chosen persons and right actions will receive the full reward when the realm of God comes, as it surely will. I tried to show how we modern Christians can learn from these teachings the clear Jewish roots of their piety which helps us think more deeply about which persons and actions should be considered important, or “blessed” and “happy.”
Today that theme of the continuity of the community of Jesus and its Jewish roots continues with the famous images of salt, light, and the city on the mountain (or “hill” more traditionally). Salt was used to flavor food, as it still is today. In addition, it was employed to preserve that food and to purify sacrifices (see Lev.2:13; Ezek.43:24). It certainly never completely lost its taste, but it could become weakened over time, hence losing its great value. Throughout the centuries that followed, huge fortunes were made by those who controlled the trade in salt. A visit to the Salzkammergut (the “salt treasury”) in Austria makes plain just how valuable the substance was for many centuries in Europe. When Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth,” (Mt.5:13) he emphasizes the enormous value his hearers possess, but warns them that that value is not permanent, unless they continue to live in the ways demanded by the Beatitudes just enumerated.
Not only are they the earth’s salt, they are also the “light of the world” (Mt.5:14). Perhaps the background of this saying is Is.2:2-5, where Jacob is called by God to “walk in the light of YHWH.” Also, Israel’s very vocation is to be a “light to the nations” (Is.42:6; 49:6). The apostle Paul picks up the image for Israel in Romans 2:19, speaking of “a light to those who are in darkness.” That Isaianic imagry is again echoed by the metaphor of “a light set on a mountain,” a reference to that famous image of Jerusalem built upon Mount Zion, to whom nations will stream “in the latter days,” seeking for the light of YHWH (Is.9;11).
Mt.5:17 is an important claim for Matthew, one that has too often been ignored or misrepresented by later Christian commentators. “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” This verse completely undercuts that heretical idea that with the coming of Jesus, the power and significance of the Torah and the prophets of Israel have been overcome, or in the language often used, superseded. Not so, says Matthew! Jesus has come to fulfill the Judaism that birthed and nurtured him. What may Matthew mean by his use of the word “fulfill?” Perhaps he means that Jesus, as God’s chosen Messiah, demonstrated obedience to the precepts enunciated in the Beatitudes, thus modeling for his disciples the ways they should follow. Or perhaps he simply implies that Jesus in his birth, life, and death was fulfilling the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible, as Matthew has been at such pains to enumerate in his Gospel? Or it could be that Matthew’s sharp emphasis on the love commandment at 22:40, from which all other commandments derive their meaning, summarizes his sense of fulfillment. It could well be all three of those ideas.
Still, his enormous emphasis in vs.18 on the fact that the power of the law and the prophets remain in force until the “passing away of heaven and earth,” and that neither a yodh (the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet; NRSV translates literally the Greek letter iota), nor a hook (traditional reading is “tittle,” but here may mean a decorative stroke added to certain letters in both Hebrew and Greek), will pass away from the Law (Torah)” until earth and heaven pass away. Indeed, all the commandments, even the very least of them (see the law of the bird’s nest of Deut. 22:6-7, for example), must be followed since all come from God. Rabbi Joseph in a well-known Jewish tractate says, “Be heedful in a light precept as in a grave one” (m. ‘Abot 2:1 quoted in Harrington’s Commentary on Matthew of 1991).
All of these passages make plain the continuity between Judaism and Matthean Christianity. For Matthew’s community there was apparently no contradiction between the Jewish Torah and Jesus’s teaching. Given Matthew’s focus in this text, there is no basis for the absurd and ill-considered attacks on “Jewish legalism,” notwithstanding the constant dangerous references to such a chimera by Martin Luther and others down the Christian ages. The assault on Judaism, that began very early in the Christians centuries and continued century after century, culminating in the unspeakable horrors of the Shoah (Holocaust) of the Jews during World War 2, remind us that the Gospel of Matthew in the main attempted to conjoin the two traditions, announcing that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, whose life and teaching were fully Jewish. It is a major tragedy in the religious history of the world that this Matthean attempt was a terrible failure for many of his readers. When we preach, let us not continue this monstrous fallacy, and heed the words of Matthew: “I have come not to destroy the Torah, but to fulfill it.”