Some years ago now there was a well-known British actor, who seemed to
have everything: fame, looks, popularity, publicity, wealth, friends and charm.
Yet to everyone’s shock, he one day, quite unexpectedly, committed suicide. His
reason? As he put it in his suicide note: “I was so bored.”
What does it mean, to be so bored that life is not worth living? To have the world at one’s feet, and to find it bland and tasteless? This curious and rather sad story has a link with the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel.
“You are the salt of the earth.” That is part of the essence of Jesus’ message. Yet what a wealth of meaning and profundity is contained in this apparently simple phrase. Consider first what salt means in our lives. Anyone who has been put on a low-salt cardiac diet will understand precisely the implications of this question, because for all the inventive substitutes science has offered, like potassium salt, there is no substance to compare with sodium chloride, good old-fashioned table salt, for bringing life and taste to food.
Food without salt is about the most boring and bland thing one can
imagine! Salt, literally, brings flavour and thus variety to life.
Now consider what would happen if salt were suddenly to lose its flavour. What use would it be to us? Its one great purpose is in bringing out the flavour of food; if it could no longer do that, it would be less than useless to us, in the words of Jesus, “fit only to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” In Jesus’ words, “You are the salt of the earth.” he says that the disciple has the same function in the world as salt has in food. Just as the task of salt is to bring out the fullness of flavour in food, so the role of the disciple of Jesus is to bring out the fullness of meaning in the world.
The world was created by God, and human beings can only really learn to understand, to love, to care for the world, if we become aware of the meaning and purpose with which God has invested it. When we grasp God’s plan for his creation, it ceases to be a bland or indifferent place, and comes alive with colour, meaning and excitement. In the words of Gerald Manley Hopkins, the English poet and Jesuit priest, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
This is at the heart of Jesus’ message “You are the salt of the earth.” It is God’s plan to reveal the purpose and destiny of his creation through the person of Jesus Christ. We are to be his presence in the world, through whom he reveals God’s presence to mankind. God wants us to be the means by which all men to see the glory, his glory, which shines out through creation, leading us beyond that which we see to the Creator himself.
Do you see yourself as one through whom the “grandeur of God” is revealed to the world? One has the uncomfortable feeling that we can be our own worst enemy in this task. Another British poet, Swinburne, wrote of Jesus: “Thou hast conquered, o Pale Galilean, and the world has grown grey with thy breath.” If this is the image the Church really projects, then we have much to answer for.
For we know of the great Creator of all, who saw that all he had
made was good; we have been shown how any ugliness, any dullness in the world is
not part of the nature of the creation itself, but the grey and dull ugliness
of sin, which we have brought upon it. And we have been entrusted with the
glorious news of its redemption through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ
“for us men and for our salvation.” Finally, we know that God’s plan is for a renewal of creation, a restoration
beyond even its initial beauty and goodness, to something unimaginably
beautiful and holy.
If we are to be the “salt of the earth,” we must fulfill our God-given
task of communicating the “grandeur of God” to those around us. May God bless
each one of us, and may he make us, in word and deed, the “salt of the earth,”
so that all men, in the words of the Psalmist, might “taste and see that the
Lord is good.” Amen.
Fr Phillip
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