Salt of the Earth

(Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 5:13-20)

Jesus said, ‘You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.’ (Matt 5:13)

A way back in the mid 60s of the last century, after I had finished my training for the ministry in Melbourne, Pam and I set out for the adventure of post graduate study in Berkeley, California. Along with just about every other such hopeful student researcher, we were flat broke, holding our noses just above the economic floodtide; no wriggle-room for anything but essentials. But we did try to scrimp and scrape enough to treat ourselves to a meal out once a fortnight. No fancy restaurants with starched linen tablecloths, of course. But we could afford one of those food halls in the middle of shopping malls where you get a fast meal for a few bucks. So, this day we set off, the requisite few dollars gleaming in our hands. I was starving. There was a fish and chip shop in the hall which made honey golden chips in huge quantities and fish fillets blown up in deep fried beer-batter that covered a plate from one side to the other. Shocking for long term cholesterol levels, no doubt, but delicious in the moment.

We gathered our groaning plates and sat down at a spare table. A little salt, I thought, and this will be perfect. On the table, conveniently within reach, there were large salt and pepper shakers. No doubt their jumbo size meant to cater for the hundreds of people who went through the place each day. I grabbed the container and shook it over my plate. The only trouble was that the person who had used it before me had undone the lid of the shaker and left it just balancing on the top. As I upended it over my chips, the lid fell off, and half a pound of white, fine grained, smoothly running salt dumped itself across my meal. The golden fish and honey chips disappeared under a mountain of sodium chloride. It was an unimaginable misery. Do what we could to spoon, brush, blow, mop up the salt, it was all over. A million tiny grains of the stuff had penetrated every nook and crevice of the meal. It was inedible.

I guess we all have our salt stories, from which we might leap into an interpretation of Jesus’ words about his disciples as salt of the earth. From my story I would draw a couple of inferences. First, you can’t make a whole meal of salt. Salt, as Jesus says, is savour, not the main course. Salt is a catalyst. Its presence is intended to bring out, to enhance the flavor and substance of the food to which it is added in small quantities. Salt helps other material to become what it ought to be; to make fish taste more fish-like, not to replace the fish.

If it is fair to press this interpretation theologically, and I think it is in this instance, we could say that the task of the church, the disciples of Jesus, is not just to dump ourselves on the world in a great pile, so to speak, to take the world over, but to be a catalyst; to dot and dust ourselves here and there in the world as it goes about its ordinary business, and by being there as a savour, the savour of God, to help the world better be the world God would have it be. In short the church lives not for itself alone, like salt in a big shaker; the task of the church is to go into the world around about, but to do so in such a way that we don’t just dump on the world, but help to enhance the world’s true life. We go to our homes, our schools, our offices, travel bureaus, shops, restaurants, libraries, board rooms, hospitals, courts—anywhere and everywhere; and there we are to be the divine salt, a catalyst helping to make all these places and functions more human and humane in whatever ways present themselves to us. Such is the church as salt of the earth.

Incidentally, I would say that a second, rather more prosaic lesson to be drawn from my story, is, when dining out always check the lid on the salt shaker before upending it over your plate.

That’s all very well, but it’s pretty vague. What is ‘divine salt’? What’s it taste like? How would we recognize it? Jesus doesn’t say in so many words. But he does give us a clue. After using the images of salt, light and a city set on a hill, Jesus goes on to say: ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.’ In short, what he is now saying in these images stands in direct agreement, in a direct line, with the basic message of the prophets. Now if we do a bit of research (and the commentators have certainly done it!), we find that almost all of the major images and words of this section of the sermon on the mount are drawn from Isaiah; light, lamp stands, city on a hill; mission to the nations; it’s all there. So the lectionary writers are right on target when they link the Isaiah 58 passage with Jesus’ words in Matthew 5.

And, if we look at Isaiah’s text with Jesus’ words in mind we see at once that Isaiah is really talking about salt that has lost its savour. He is dealing with God’s people (Israel in this instance) who have all the trappings of religious diligence, of seeking God’s presence, of attending to God’s covenant with them. All this being summed up in his discussion of ‘the fast’, that is a religious observance ostensibly practiced to demonstrate and mediate obedience to God. But in Isaiah’s estimation it’s not a true fast, it’s a religious sham. ‘’Look you serve your own interest on your fast day (not God’s), and oppress all your workers. .. you quarrel and fight and strike with a wicked fist…’ And he concludes, ‘such fasting as you do will not make your voice heard on high.’ In other words, this is savourless salt. It has the outward appearance of salt; but it’s tasteless; it doesn’t do in the world what needs to be done for God’s world to be truly as God intends.

What is missing? Three things basically. One. Justice: ‘This is the fast I choose, says the Lord (or if you like, this is the salt I require) ‘to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free.’ Religious ‘salt’ that does not bother with the struggle for justice in the earth is savourless. And when we look at the life Jesus lived we see how at one with this Isaiah vision he is; when it comes to the work of justice, Jesus is not an abolition, but fulfillment of the tradition.

Two. Compassion: What is acceptable to the Lord?, says Isaiah: ‘to share your breads with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them …’ Religious salt that loses interest in compassion and kindness in the earth, is no longer a catalyst for God’s taste in the world. And again looking at the life of Jesus we see how congruent his actions and attitudes are with this vision of Isaiah; Jesus is not abolition, but fulfillment.

Three. Truth and truthfulness. ‘If you remove … the pointing of the finger and the speaking of evil … then your light shall rise in the darkness’; or in the image we are pursuing, then your saltiness will release its true savour. To be in the world as a catalyst for truth in the concrete situations we find ourselves in is to be salt in Jesus’ sense. His life was lived in truth in word, in witness, and in action. Again, not abolition but fulfiment.

Justice, compassion, truth these are the salt of God in the stuff of the earth. These are needed in every area of our life and experience, whether we are teachers, doctors, parents, sellers, policy people, entrepreneurs, mechanics, or candlestick makers. And our gathering together in Christ’s name on Sunday’s (nestling as it were here in one big salt shaker!) is pointless, or better, tasteless, unless in our dispersal during the week we take into our lives the saltiness of justice, compassion and truth. This is the taste we will be known by; the difference we can make. Not that other people, who don’t share the faith, won’t be with us in this catalytic action. They will, as the selfless actions of so many in these dreadful storms reveal. The salt of the Holy Spirit runs wider than the church; thank God. But wherever else it might be, here in our community it must be, if we are to be salt that has God’s saviour.

I want to finish with one last little plug, if you can bear it! Notice Jesus says ‘you are the salt of the earth’, not just salt of society, or salt of humanity, but salt of the earth. The whole earth is God’s nourishment; and the whole earth needs God’s salt. The strange and terrible weather events of these days point us to the question of our human interaction and interdependence with the earth. Justice, compassion and truth, the salt of the Lord, are needed badly in these times in our human relationships with the more than human earth in which we live.

Jesus said, ‘You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.’

Graeme Garrett

Canberra Baptist Church

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

6 February 2011