Pass the Salt

Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth.”

And then he gives a warning. Salt can lose its saltiness. It can lose the very thing that makes it useful.

Photo by Pavel Neznanov on Unsplash

Now, I love to cook when I have time. And the other day I looked in my pantry and realized I have something like eleven different kinds of salt. Which may say something about my cooking, or my shopping, or perhaps some deeper spiritual condition we don’t need to explore at this moment. But there they were. Smoked salt. Flaked salt. Sea salt harvested from oceans around the world, basic salt for cooking, and then the fancy kinds, the ones meant to be used at the very end. Finishing salt, they call it. You sprinkle it over the meal right before it is served, just a little, and it adds crunch and savor and brightness.

Not all salt is the same. But every kind of salt is meant to do something. Salt preserves and heals and brings out flavor. Salt can sting where there is a wound, but even that sting can be part of its work. Salt isn’t meant to sit untouched in a beautiful little jar, admired for being exotic or expensive or pretty. It is meant to be poured out, mixed in, given away.

The question for us today isn’t, “Are we salt?” Jesus has already answered that. The question is, “What makes us lose our saltiness?”

And I wonder if one answer is this: we lose our saltiness when we pay more attention to the noise of the world than to the voice of God. Now, I don’t mean that we should ignore the world. The Gospel never asks us to be indifferent to suffering, injustice, cruelty, or need. Quite the opposite. Jesus sends us straight into the world as salt and light.

But there is a difference between loving the world and being formed by the world’s outrage. There is a difference between paying attention to pain and letting panic become our spiritual director. There is a difference between being informed and being consumed.

The world is very good at demanding our attention. It tells us what and who to fear. It tells us who to blame. It tells us what to be angry about next. It tells us that urgency is the same thing as faithfulness, that outrage is the same thing as courage, and that contempt is the same thing as truth.

And if we listen to those voices long enough, we may begin to sound less and less like Jesus. We become reactive instead of faithful, anxious instead of grounded, sharp in ways that do not heal. We become loud in ways that bring more heat than light. And salt, when it loses its purpose, becomes useless.

But Jesus doesn’t only say, “You are the salt of the earth.” He adds, “You are the light of the world.” Light doesn’t have to scream to be light. It doesn’t need heat to shine. Light reveals. It helps people see. It makes a way possible where there seemed to be no way.

And that is holy work. Our calling isn’t to echo every outrage or to be swept away by every demand. Our calling is to listen deeply for the voice of God and then live in such a way that the world can taste mercy again; to preserve what is good, to draw out what is beautiful, to heal what has been wounded, and to add, maybe even at the very last moment, some unexpected savor to a weary world.

So today, the invitation is at once simple and difficult: listen for the voice that makes you more loving, not less. Listen for the voice that calls you toward mercy, courage, truth, and compassion. Listen for the voice that sounds like Jesus.

Because anything that asks us to love less, to welcome fewer, to forgive less deeply, to hope less boldly, is not from God.

You are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of the world.

Don’t let the noise make you forget who you are.