Salty
/Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. -Matthew 5:13-14
How can salt lose its flavor? For a long time I puzzled over what Jesus was saying here, since it seemed to me that salt is always salty, no matter what you do to it. You can grind it fine, add it to other things or even dissolve it in water, but the distinct flavor of salt will still be there. For those of us who think of salt mainly as a seasoning (or as an ice melt in this part of the world!) it’s hard to imagine salt losing that salty taste.
But then one day I realized that people in Jesus’ time regularly used salt to preserve food in a way we rarely do today. They had no refrigerators, of course, and salt preservation was a key way to store food. Fresh fish, for example, would be laid in a box in a box between thick layers of salt to dry and preserve them. Salt dried fish are often mentioned in the Bible, like, for example, when Jesus took a five small salted fish offered by a young boy, along with two barley loaves and somehow fed 5000 people.
When salt-preserving fish, the salt could be used a number of times with new batches of fish. But eventually, the salt would get so rank and fishy, it would have to be discarded. I suspect that maybe Jesus was thinking of salt in this Sunday’s reading mainly as a preservative, and not as a seasoning, as we do. And if that was how he meant it, it seems to me that just as he is warning his listeners not to diminish their God given light by covering it with a bushel basket, he’s telling them not to let this fishy world corrupt their God-given saltiness, either. Don’t hid your light under a bushel, he says, and also - don’t let the world take away the unique flavor and saving faith that God has given you.
What are the bushel baskets with which you tend to hide the light that is within you? What are the stinky fish that mess up your god-given identity? How can you adopt the Jesus’ images Jesus in this passage to free your inner light and keep you salty and fresh in faith?
