Salt and Light
Metaphors of Mission
You are the salt of the earth! You are the light of the world! I hear these statements as exclamations, as commands to be what you are, to realize your true identity and purpose in life. Jesus gives us the metaphors of “salt” and “light” as ways to understand our mission as his disciples.
The images of salt and light are related to Jesus’ teaching on the beatitudes, providing further examples of what a blessed life looks like. The word we translate as “blessed” also has the connotation in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, of “being ripe or ripening.” The teaching of the beatitudes unfolds a way of life that is ripening, capable of sustaining growth and bearing fruit in the midst of life’s changes and chances. The beatitudes express the conditions that support our ripening. The result is salt and light.[1]
What does it mean to be the salt of the earth? I’ve tended to think here of table salt, used as a seasoning and preservative. That is what is indicated in the footnote to this verse in the New Oxford Annotated Bible. The idea is that we are to give flavor to life, and to safeguard it; not a bad idea, really, but not quite what Jesus is getting at.
The salt that Jesus is referring to is not table salt, sodium chloride, the kind of salt with which we are familiar. The salts in Jesus’ day were mixtures of chlorides of sodium, magnesium, and potassium, with very small amounts of gypsum. Such salt was – and is – commonly used as fertilizer, including maintaining the fertilizing properties of dung. When Jesus talks about salt losing its saltiness or flavor, he is alluding to the process by which the compounds of salts naturally disintegrate over time, making them less effective fertilizing agents. [2]
Salt was used to in arid places to help soil retain moisture, destroy weeds, make stubborn soils easier to till, and make sour grass sweeter and more appealing to cattle. In some soils, salt keeps rust from wheat, and blight from potatoes. When applied properly, salt will kill surface weeds while allowing more deeply rooted plants and grass to thrive. And when rain or irrigation allows salt to permeate soil, the salt chemically frees vital minerals and nutrients in the soil, allowing them to nourish plants.[3]
What is at stake here is the capacity to support life and growth.
So, my friends, we are called to be fertilizer! We are sent by Jesus to stimulate life in barren places, and to be mixed into the manure piles of the world to generate growth in stunted lives. When we are ripe, we bring the power of love and the grace of forgiveness to people and situations that seem unpromising, if not hopeless. We offer ourselves to the soil of other people’s lives, in our moment of greatest generativity, so that they too can ripen.
In “The Faces of Christ,” a Godly Play story for children, we say that Jesus’ work was to come close to people, especially to the people that no one else wanted to come close to. That is our work too. In the words of Anthony Bradley, “The call of the salty is the call to move toward the broken so that they may meet God and be set free to become who God wants them to be.”[4] When we are ripe, we become fertilizer that helps others to ripen.
What does it mean to be the light of the world? Here, too, we must place this metaphor in the context of Jesus’ teaching about being ripe. The word that we translate as “you” in English implies a self that is always poised somewhere between “ripeness” and “unripeness” as part of the generative activity of nature. Jesus is telling us that our true identity is not found in this transient and impermanent self, or the thoughts and feelings that it generates.
No, our deepest identity is “light,” the light of consciousness that illumines all worlds or changing forms. We are an expression of cosmic consciousness, part of the light from which all light comes. Jesus compares this light to a city built on a hill. A city is a gathering of interactions, and the multiplicity of relationships that constitutes our sense of self is actually situated on a hill (literally, a mountain formed by fire) that cannot be hidden. Our personal consciousness emerges from the fiery Heart from which all creation and consciousness derives.
We are not meant to limit or measure our light, but rather to allow it to shine through us in a clear, unveiled way. Here and now, we are to let the light radiate from within the temporary vessel of our humanity, so that the light refracted through our impermanent, fragile existence may recall us to the eternal Source of all light whose creativity unfolds through our works of service and love.[5]
Jesus, following the prophets, is telling us that it is not by being narrowly “religious” that the light is revealed, but by being compassionate. It is when we loose the bonds of injustice and liberate the oppressed, when we share bread with the hungry and housing with the poor, when we protect the vulnerable and recognize them as our siblings; it is then that our light breaks forth like the dawn and healing springs up quickly.[6]
It is through coming close to the broken, fertilizing the barren soil of our common life, being salt for the earth that the intention and action of the divine consciousness is illuminated. We are salt and light at once, or not at all. There is no consciousness without compassion. There is no compassion without consciousness. To be aware and to be merciful is one movement. To be ripe is to be salt and light.
[1] Matthew 5:1-16.
[2] Anthony Bradley, “You Are the Manure of the Earth,” Christianity Today (October 2016), p. 74.
[3] Bradley, p. 74-75.
[4] Bradley, p. 76.
[5] Neil Douglas-Klotz, Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., 2022), p. 92-93.
[6] Isaiah 58:1-9a.
Paula is more needy of home support now, so I’m letting you know that I probably will be more infrequent in my attendance for a while. Thank you for all the support you and the congregation have offered. I always look forward to reading your weekly essays. Thanks, and keep up the good work!