HOW TASTY ARE YOU?


You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men.
(Matthew 5: 13 – NAS)

In the modern world, we are so rich in salt that we use it to excess, to the endangerment of our health. We appreciate what it can add to foods in terms of flavor, but we no longer register the other aspects of salt that made it so valuable to the ancient world.

And it was very valuable indeed. The word “salary” comes from a salt reference – it was the money paid Roman soldiers so that they could buy their personal supply of salt. The city of Venice built its trading empire on the production of salt. Celts in middle Europe became wealthy mining salt and trading it to the Mediterranean region.

Salt not only adds flavor to foods, it helps preserve them. This is part of what created its value. Mint adds flavor too, but it doesn’t have the power to keep meats edible as long as salt does. Salt is also important to the process of tanning animal skins, making them useful as garments.

Our bodies need a certain amount of salt. It helps us retain water in our cells, preventing dehydration. Because of its quality of absorbing fluids, it is useful in cleaning wounds (yes, it stings, but it helps dry out the wound).

So when Jesus calls his followers “the salt of the earth,” He is declaring that they are very valuable. He looks to them to accept their place as crucial parts of the society they are in.

It makes for an interesting question then: just how necessary are we to the people around us? What do we bring to their lives?

Salt brings out the flavor of a food. You could say that salt makes a food taste more like itself. Do we do that for the people around us, or do we try to make them into what we think they should be? Do we try and reshape them into being someone else, either some made-up personality or reflections of ourselves? It’s a danger mentors run into, making the mistake of creating mini-versions of themselves, instead of guiding their students into being more fully the individuals they were meant to be. As salt in this situation, we should be encouraging each other to be better, brighter versions of themselves, whatever that might be.

But more than that, salt also has its own flavor. If we are “salt,” what sort of flavor are we to those around us? Are we tasty and pleasing, or are we bitter and sour? Are we bland and flavorless, or exciting to encounter? Are we so distasteful that people find a single encounter is more than enough, or are we so flavorful that people keep returning to be with us?

How often do we think of this as a commandment from Jesus: “be the life of the party”? So often the person that gets tagged with that title is actually the pathetically dangerous drunk who has lost all restraints. But, to be the true life of a party or of any gathering, we would have to be that which brings life to others. In other words, function like salt.

What about the other qualities of salt? How well do we act like those? Are we any good at preserving things so that others can use them? Do we, by nature, take care to sustain those around us? Are we any good at cleansing wounds, whether they are physical, emotional or spiritual? Are we any good at drawing the toxicity out of a hurting soul and cleaning that heart so that it can be healed by God?

When Jesus calls us the salt of the world, there is so much more than being tasty, then. We have functions, duties, uses. And they are obligations that are subtle because they are part of the very fabric of life.

We should be nearly invisible as we go about our jobs as salt. For that is another quality of salt, it is for the most part without major color. It absorbs itself into fluids and substances, and doesn’t leave much visible trace – unless too much is used.

But Jesus has a warning for us as well. He reminded His followers that the salt they knew could lose its flavor and become useless.

We could stumble over this in the modern age, dismissing it, because our basic high school chemistry tells us that “salt is salt.” It doesn’t really change. This is where knowing a little bit of history and basic use becomes important to understanding what Jesus is talking about here. In His time, salt was not purified the way it is for us now. There were often minerals mixed in with the salt. Additionally, exposure to humidity could leach the salt off the minerals. If care was not taken to protect the salt, it was easy enough to lose those aspects of it which made it useful. What would be left when this sort of thing happened? Inedible particles of minerals and bitter salts. Nothing useful could be done with this, so it got tossed out the door into the walkways of the community.

When we are struggling with the basics of our own lives, we have a hard time thinking about this call from Jesus to be flavorful for other people. Where are the salt-people of our own lives, we wonder? But are we looking for the over-load of salt on a potato chip (a less than nutritious “comfort food”) or are we looking for the light seasoning that makes bland food better?

“You are the salt of the earth.” Go be tasty, useful, necessary, and nearly invisible as you work your saltiness.