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After opening with a list of those who are actively participating in the blessings of the Kingdom (we call this list “the Beatitudes”), Jesus continues to describe the Kingdom of God (his primary Gospel message) by describing the calling and subsequent plight of Israel. 

“You beloved, are the salt of the earth. But if salt becomes bland and loses its saltiness, can anything make it salty again? No. It is useless. It just lies there, white and bland and grainy. It is tossed out, thrown away, or trampled. 
And you, beloved, are the light of the world. A city built on a hilltop cannot be hidden. Similarly it would be silly to light a lamp and then hide it under a bowl. When someone lights a lamp, she puts it on a table or a desk or a chair, and the light illumines the entire house. You are like that illumining light. Let your light shine everywhere you go, that you may illumine creation, so men and women everywhere may see your good actions, may see creation at its fullest, may see your devotion to Me, and may turn and praise your Father in heaven because of it.” (The Voice) 

It would be extremely easy to miss what Jesus has done here.

Salt & Light are ways of describing the original calling of Israel.
Bland, tossed out, and hidden are ways of describing the current reality of Israel. 

Make sense?

And he drops a simple line here that has easily graspable cultural connotations from the ancient world: “A City built on a hilltop cannot be hidden.” 

Hold on Jesus, I’ll let you finish, but let me respond to this: Duh.

I’m just kidding. But seriously. Is that an obvious statement or what? 

So why does he make it?

As usual, Jesus does this amazing thing where he combines Hope with Despair. In a funny way, he’s lamenting the plight of Israel but casting a vision of something better. He calls it the Kingdom of God.

A city on a hill cannot be hidden. 

So even though the salt (Israel) has been derided and is now worthless (under Roman oppression), there’s something enduring about the nature of what God is doing in the world. And even though the light has been hidden, it has not been smoked out. 

Even the combination of the two metaphors is confusing if we’re honest. The salt metaphor has a degree of finality to it, whereas the lamp metaphor completely lacks it. 

May I suggest it’s because they’re just metaphors? And metaphors do a good job of describing a thing but they are not, in reality, the thing itself. Metaphors give us a truth but they are not formulaic. 

This is not a final indictment of anything. It’s a lament and a prophecy. He starts with a metaphor that sounds hopeless but follows it up with one that casts vision for something better.  

The Kingdom of God is ever enduring. It may have lost its saltiness and it may appear to be no good anymore… but God is in the restoration business. 

The Kingdom of God is ever active. The broken people may have hidden it under a bed or a bowl, but God is in the business of setting things right.

The Kingdom of God is ever present. It is a City on a hilltop. God is in the business of drawing people to Himself.

In this passage, Jesus is molding his disciples’ imagination. They had an idea about what it meant to be The People of God, and Jesus will stretch and rework this idea. As Matthew develops the Sermon on the Mount, we will continue to see how Jesus is describing this Kingdom. It should be poignant that he’s shaping this Good News in this context: the calling to be the Salt & Light of the World.