Jesus calls us to be salt and light in our world. Salt and light are both important in our lives - salt to add flavour and to preserve freshness; light for our safe well-being and to enable us to see clearly. The call is for the disciples of the Lord to bring freshness and direction to the lives of others by the qualities we associate with salt and light. They represent creativity, confidence, hope and openness to whatever God requires of us as disciples - people who live for others, being for them the signs and realities of God's presence and God's purposes. One way we discern God's purposes within the long teaching tradition of our church is by listening and sharing the Scriptures, broken for us each Sunday at Mass, offered to us by faithful preaching of the Word of God or by thoughtful reflection in classroom and other settings. The task of preachers, teachers and commentators is somehow to bring the selected readings to life so that they connect with our lives as we gather to worship, to listen, to be strengthened and encouraged in our life of faith week by week. This new series of reflections on the Sunday Gospels in the year of Matthew is not concerned primarily to be commentary on the text but on the message of the text; their purpose is not so much to inform as to inspire. The reflections by a master craftsman are written to unpack the Gospel - not simply Matthew's special theological emphases but his teaching about how we are to live with one another in the stuff of the everyday. Integral to the book is the author's assumption that life and faith belong together; that God who brings freshness and light in our lives is lavish with gifts, patient and energising for goodness, for fruitfulness, for life in its fullness. Here is a book that takes seriously the command of Jesus that we be life giving in our world, encouraging us to become people fully alive with the energy of the life of the Creator. The book is for priests and preachers, parents and teachers and for all who seek the transformation and fullness of life that God offers us in the breaking of the Word and who have the courage and the wisdom to accept the challenge of the Word and incarnate its message in our daily lives. Peter Varengo is a Salesian priest, presently engaged in full time Adult Retreat Ministry. He has been a professed religious for more than fifty years and a priest for more than forty. He studied Theology at the Salesian University in Rome; and Religious Education in Maynooth (Ireland) and in Boston College (USA). He has taught at Catholic Theological College in Melbourne and been involved in parish ministry for many years.