Salt and Light

The Mennonite Preacher Anslo and his Wife - Rembrandt

Salt and Light (Matthew 5: 13-16)

You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its flavor, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled on by people. You are the light of the world. A city located on a hill cannot be hidden. People do not light a lamp and put it under a basket but on a lamp stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before people, so that they can see your good deeds and give honor to your Father in heaven.


Salt is not steak; salt and pepper are not egg. Steak without salt is bland, bleak. Egg without salt and pepper is, well, just egg. Nobody says, though, when eating a steak, I’m enjoying barbecued salt. Nobody says, I had salt and pepper for breakfast.


And you are light, that wonderful quirk of the laws of physics that allows you to act both as a wave and as a particle, making possible the knowledge from a distance of where things are, their nature and their relationship to all other things. Amazing. Light that makes it possible to find our way. Light that illuminates stuff, but for all practical purposes is not itself stuff.


Like salt, it acts to enhance, not to create. It magnifies, it beautifies what has already been. It’s probably only the blind who can witness to the profound enhancement to life of light.


So what does this profound beatitude mean . . . anyway? Here are a couple of takes on it, assuming that Jesus’ audience—the YOU in You are the salt, etc.—were friends and followers, not Pharisees and Sadducees.


One: Christians are to the world as salt is to steak. They brighten up the flavour, they are not the meal. They are not charged in this case with leading all the world to become salt. Their effect is to bless the whole world through their savoury presence. Salt that would taste exactly like steak, pepper like egg, would be as useless as, well, windshield wipers on horses.


It reflects back to one of the meanings of choseness with reference to the children of Israel in the Old Testament, namely that they are chosen as a vehicle for God’s blessing of the people of the earth: And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do; Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? (Genesis 18:17-18)


I have seen the hands of God, and behold, they were attached to the ends of my arms.


Two: We have been chosen by Christ to hold the flashlight for people attempting to navigate a perilous world. This is not to say that we take them by the hand and lead them to what we think ought to be their destination; the choice of path is theirs to make. But we do what we can to shine the light on the hazards, illuminate the beauties along their voyage.


And what forms does that take? The peaceful, contented life of those who have experienced rebirth to new possibilities, to the vanquishing of fear, hate, anger; who are settled into the earthly family that actually loves, tolerates, hopes; these are they that shine a light for others to guide them to good choices.


And the you are the light of the world people potentially make the best counselors, teachers, guides, story tellers, preservers of history, politicians, health-care workers . . . .. They shine the light of Christ on a world groping its way to who-knows-where, to whatever!


And yet, I think we tend to define the Christian life far too narrowly . . . most of the time. To say that being salt and light are the be-all, end-all for the Christian might be to proof-text a preference, much like saying, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15) is all one needs to know. Both our scriptures and our histories are full of admonitions on ways-to-be, some complementary, some contradictory, some just plain abstruse.


But experience seems to reinforce the importance of seeing ourselves as salt and light to the world no matter what other metaphor preoccupies our thinking from time to time. It’s significance can never be over-estimated, will never be refuted, I think. 


Salt without flavour, a light under a laundry tub? Not good.