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 diet will understand
precisely the implications of this question. Salt, literally, brings flavour
and thus variety to food. 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.” The disciple of Jesus has the same function in the world as salt
has in food; to bring out the fullness of its meaning. 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 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. And in founding his Church and calling us to be members, Jesus is
calling us to be members of his very own
Body. In other words, we are to
be his presence in the world, through
which 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? If
we are to be the “salt of the earth,” we must fulfil our God-given task of communicating
the “grandeur of God” to those around us. In following the path that God has
chosen for us, then, let it be our
purpose to become a people who bring light, life and meaning to the world, a people
through whom it blazes forth as “charged with the grandeur of God”? May God bless
each one of us, and may he truly 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.
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