I grew up evangelical, with a particular kind of soundtrack. "Just a closer walk with Thee." “I come to the garden alone" where Jesus "walks with me and talks with me and tells me I am his own." "Jesus, Lover of My Soul." Beautiful songs. Meaningful songs. Songs that taught me that faith is fundamentally a transaction between Jesus and me. My salvation. My relationship. My personal walk with God.

The youth group reinforced it. Altar calls asked, "Have YOU accepted Jesus as YOUR personal Lord and Savior?" Small group questions centered on "What is God teaching YOU right now?" Even the language we used for conversion: "I invited Jesus into MY heart."

I'm not trying to trash this. Intimacy with God matters. Personal transformation matters. But here's what this formation did to me: it made faith private, individual, manageable. It taught me that being a Christian meant having the right kind of personal relationship with Jesus, believing the right things, and avoiding certain sins so I could get into heaven. Church was the place where I learned to be a good individual Christian, which the Sermon on the Mount sounds like a personal manifesto.

But then I actually read Matthew 5.

Jesus has just finished the Beatitudes. He's gathered his ragtag community of mourners and mercy-makers, the poor in spirit and the persecuted, and now he tells them who they are. And here's where my evangelical training failed me, because when I first read "You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world," I read it as a personal compliment. Jesus was talking to me. Telling me to be a good witness. Encouraging me to let my individual light shine.

But the text won't let me do that.

In the original language, there's no ambiguity. Y'ALL are the salt of the earth. Not "you" singular. "You" plural. Y'ALL are the light of the world.

Jesus isn't giving individuals a pep talk. He's talking about a communal vocation. And once you see that, you can't unsee it, and it changes everything about what faith is actually for.

Because here's what happens when you make these verses singular, when you make them about private individual faith: They shrink. The stakes drop. "I am the salt" becomes manageable. "I am the light" becomes something I can control, something I can keep hidden if it gets too risky, something I can turn off when it's inconvenient.

But "We are the salt"? "We are the light"? Suddenly, the exposure increases, and you can't hide it. A single candle, you can cover. But a city on a hill?

Jesus says it himself: it can't be hidden.

So let's talk about what salt and light are actually FOR when they're communal vocations rather than individual virtues.

Salt in first-century Palestine wasn't just a condiment on your table. It was survival technology. When you didn’t have refrigeration, salt preserved meat so your family could eat through winter.

When your food was bland or borderline rotten, salt made it edible.

When you had guests, offering salt signaled hospitality and competence. Salt was about keeping people alive and fed in a subsistence economy where even one bad harvest meant hunger.

So when Jesus says, "Y'all are the salt of the earth," he's not paying us a compliment. He's giving us a job description. Our community's purpose is to preserve what's good, to make life fit for human consumption for people ground down by systems designed to exploit, to enable survival in a world trained to normalize starvation.

But then he asks the hard question: "But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?"

Now here's something most English translations miss. The word Jesus uses can mean "lose its flavor," but it also means "become foolish." It's the same word you'd use for someone who's lost their sense.

Ancient salt from the Dead Sea region was often impure. If the sodium chloride leached out, you'd have worthless residue that looked like salt but couldn't preserve anything, couldn't season anything, couldn't do the work salt is supposed to do.

Jesus calls out what happens when communities retain the appearance of discipleship but lose their purpose. When they look like a church but don’t actually preserve anything or make anything more livable. That's not just bland; it’s foolish.