Salt and Light

Jesus once stood on a mountain and said,

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.

You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

Salt and Light. What do these two metaphors mean?

The idea that we are to be salt is a little challenging to interpret, since the Bible and biblical cultures considered salt in a variety of ways. Salt was a preservative; salt was a seasoning; but salt was also a sign of brackishness and stagnation, and Jewish scholars have read a lot into comparing the living freshwater of the Jordan River and the salty stagnation of the Dead Sea. James 3:12 even mentions that a river cannot produce both fresh and salty water as a way of explaining the difficulties in taming the harmful ways we speak to each other. So obviously, there's some parsing to be done to put things in correct context.

Colossians 4:6 encourages us, "Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how to answer each one." And Mark 9:50 says that "salt is good, but if salt loses its flavor, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace with one another." It seems to me that Paul and Jesus are talking about the way salt not season food, but also sustains its flavor and preserves it -- in other words, not only does salt bring food to life, but it also keeps it alive, and if you lose the salt, then what else do you have? (Pepper. Pepper Potts, if you're Ironman.) That saltiness, that vibrancy, that life, should emanate from the way we keep community with each other.

Here's the other thing. Salt doesn't lose its flavor. It's a stable ionic compound and doesn't tend to change chemically, so its flavor is part of its permanent inherent characteristics. So maybe we also can't lose our flavor, and that bringing of joy, life, vibrancy, hope, seasoning to the world is something that Christians fundamentally do, and if we "lose our flavor," we're simply forgetting who we are.

The idea of Christians being light to the world is a little more straightforward -- our lives and "good works" should shine before people such that they would wonder and glorify God. It's a little interesting that Jesus calls His followers the "light of the world" in Matthew 5:14, and yet Jesus is called the "light of the world," explicitly in John 8:12 and 9:1-5, and implied to be "light" in Matthew 4:16, John 3:19, 1 John 1:1-5, and many, many other verses.

The fact that both Jesus and His followers are called "light" isn't even an issue that the Bible really sidesteps. Isaiah 49:6 talks of Jesus when it says, "I will also give You as a light to the Gentiles, that You should be My salvation (Jesus, in Hebrew, Y'shua, means Salvation) to the ends of the earth." Yet when Paul quotes this verse in Acts 13:47, he expresses it as a commission for Christians: "For so the Lord has commanded us: 'I have set you as a light to the Gentiles, that you should be for salvation to the ends of the earth.'"

Jesus probably puts it best in John 12:35-36, when He tells people, "A little while longer the light is with you. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you; he who walks in darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may becomes sons of light." To aspire to be a "son of light" sounds very mystical and hard to put a finger on doctrinally, but it's important to remember that a metaphor is often more valuable when you read it and allow the image to move you than to analyze the life out of it. Sometimes I have a hard time keeping from reading the Living Word of God as a history and literature textbook.

Finally, the Bible gives yet another usage of the word "light" that might be confusing to the novice reader, in Luke 12:48:

But the one who did not know and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating.