“You are the salt of the earth.” Jesus says it like he fully expects us to know what he means. But we don’t; his assertive pronouncement makes us wonder, and perhaps that’s the point.
“You are the salt of the earth.” It’s a statement of fact, an affirmation. Jesus doesn’t say, “You must be the salt.” It’s not a matter of trying. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in The Cost of Discipleship, “It is not for the disciples to decide whether they will be the salt of the earth, for they are so whether they like it or not, they have been made salt by the call they have received.”[1]
We love the taste of salt, it’s in our genes. Our bodies crave it, because they cannot function without it. In addition to helping maintain the right balance of fluids, salt helps transmit nerve impulses, and it allows our muscles to work properly. Unrefined salt contains just about everything you find in a bottle of Gatorade, except artificial color and flavor. Unrefined salt is a convenient package of sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, as well as other vital minerals. It is as though we carry in our bodies an ancient memory of the sea, and as long as we have a tiny dose of the ocean in us, we thrive. Salt is in our blood, sweat, and tears. “You are the salt of the earth” — does he mean essential like that for the world’s wellbeing?
Salt has been, for thousands of years, one of the most widely-used food preservatives, especially for meat and fish. The ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians traded salt fish and salt from North Africa throughout the Mediterranean, and salt roads crisscross all continents, except Antarctica. The soldiers in Rome’s armies were paid with salt allotments, called salaria in Latin, and many of us still work for a salary. Salt was precious, and pressed into cakes it was one of the earliest currencies in the world. Salt has been a crucial ingredient in just about all known human cultures, and it is no surprise that it gave rise to a variety of symbolic uses.
Because of its use as a food preservative, salt came to represent permanence and protection. In ancient Israel and among its Near Eastern neighbors, a pinch of salt was eaten by the parties to agreements and treaties. Sharing salt expressed a binding relationship. In Israel’s scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, the expression “covenant of salt” illustrates the permanent nature of God’s covenant with God’s people. We talk about “rules written in stone” or “iron laws,” but God’s covenants are “covenants of salt,” based in a living relationship of partners who have bound themselves to each other.[2] “You shall not omit from your grain offering the salt of the covenant with your God,” we read in Leviticus, “with all your offerings you shall offer salt.”[3] There certainly was the notion that salt would purify the gift to make it acceptable as a sacred offering, but the pinch of salt served as a reaffirmation of covenant fidelity.
The preservative power of salt may have been the reason behind its becoming the substance of choice to ward off evil forces in general. I remember a grandmother on the Italian side of our family, who would throw a pinch of salt over her left shoulder, muttering a well-worn prayer whenever she felt she needed to keep the devil away. Cultural anthropologists are quite confident that mothers began rubbing their newborn babies with salt thousands of years ago to protect them against evil spirits, as mothers and midwives continue to do to this day in many parts of the world. But I can’t help but wonder — when a mother in Israel rubbed her infant with salt, didn’t she also rub that little one, head to toe, with the covenant promises of God? She may have put a grain of salt on her child’s lips to keep evil out, but didn’t she also do it to give her little one a taste of God’s faithfulness? I like to think she did, and that salt — that wondrous, precious substance — never meant just one thing, but gained ever new layers of meaning, from generation to generation. There still is an expression in modern Arabic, “there is salt between us,” meaning, “we are like family, we are close friends.”
Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth.” He says it to those who have been summoned to follow him on the way of grace; and he says it right after declaring, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Our following him on the way will evoke rejection and defamation, he says, even persecution — and he tells us to rejoice, because we are on the way with him. “You are the salt of the earth,” and for ages his followers have heard him affirm, You are precious. You are essential. You bring healing. You add flavor and zest to the world. You embody divine hospitality and friendship. The earth cannot be without you. We may feel like there’s nothing wrong with adding a little religious icing to the world’s cake, but he tells us what we are: the salt of the earth. Not sugar, not syrup, but salt. A community of followers that adds a particular, essential quality and flavor. People whose life together is vital for the wellbeing of the earth.
You are the salt of the earth. We live in a culture that is incredibly creative, but more and more of our collective attention seems to revolve around consumption and entertainment, and not around building strong communities. There is plenty of hostility toward the gospel that calls us to live as members of one household, and in our context, none of it comes in the form of outright persecution. It’s more like an endless loop of commercials: friendly faces, beautiful images, great music, and clever lines inviting me 24/7 to believe that life really is all about me. We are surrounded by powerful alternatives to covenant living, and we are constantly being enticed to embrace them—rather than living our lives as those who have been summoned to follow Jesus. Rabbi Shai Held commented on today’s passage from Isaiah:
So much of human religiosity comes down to a hoax we try to perpetrate on God. We’ll give You worship, we say in effect, and You just mind Your own business. Your place is the church, the synagogue, or the mosque; butt out of our workplaces and our voting stations. You’re the God of religion, not politics or economics.
And God laughs. If you want to worship me, God says, you’re going to have to learn to care about what I care about—and who. And as the Bible never tires of telling us, God cares about the widow, the orphan, and the stranger; the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden. If those people don’t matter to us, then God doesn’t really matter to us either. That’s Isaiah’s message.[4]
Isaiah reminds us that God desires a people who undo the knots of injustice and break the yokes that are keeping their neighbors from walking erect, a people who share their bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into the house and clothe the naked — instead of worrying, Jesus adds, about what they will eat or drink or wear.[5]
In our world, the forces of privatization and fragmentation are winning against the social solidarity implicit in covenantal faith. But God’s imperatives speak against selfish preoccupation with our own needs and passions, declaring again and again that we are members of one another. And it’s not only God’s imperatives. Jesus addresses us in the indicative, “You are the salt of the earth,” and we know one thing for sure: We have been summoned to a holy purpose. We are good for something. We are meant to add something essential.
And the same Jesus who, speaking of himself, said, “I am the light of the world,” says to his followers: “You are the light of the world — in your whole existence, provided you remain faithful to your calling. And since you are that light, you can no longer remain hidden, even if you want to."[6] Being the light of the world is not optional. It is simply who and what we are when we follow Jesus: His light infuses our actions, our speaking and thinking, and it shines forth from all that we are and do, to the glory of God. We are the light because we have been lit — not for our own sakes, but for the sake of the world.
I have a deep desire to understand where we are and how we got here — a fragmented and fragmenting church in a fragmented and fragmenting world — and what this means for us as followers of Jesus and servants of God’s reign. I want to understand the forces that divide and polarize people around the world, the forces that drive us away from each other and into isolation. I want to understand, but that’s not the one thing necessary.
Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” And in each of these bold declarations, the ‘you’ is plural. That may well be the most important detail to hear these days: Amid all that is fragmenting us, there is a hidden ‘us’ being addressed and called forth by Jesus. The one thing necessary is that we follow him.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 130.
[2] Numbers 18:19; 2 Chronicles 13:5
[3] Leviticus 2:13
[4] Rabbi Shai Held https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/august-25-ordinary-21c-isaiah-589b-14
[5] Matthew 6:25
[6] See Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 131-132.