Matthew 5.13.
5.13
The following previously appeared on my religion blog, More Christ.
If you’ve ever heard someone referred to as “salt of the earth,” they usually mean a decent, unremarkable person. That’s not quite what Jesus meant when He coined it.
Salt is a flavor enhancer, and that’s what Jesus’s followers do: We flavor the earth.
Salt was used as a preservative in those pre-freezer, pre-canning days. Frequently this verse is interpreted to mean that we Christians are supposed to preserve what’s good in the world. But clearly Jesus wasn’t talking about preservative: He refers to salt’s flavor. This salt is valuable because it tastes like salt. Salt doesn’t need to have any flavor in order to preserve things. Jesus is talking about seasoning.
Actual salt never loses its flavor. But salt, in ancient times, wasn’t pure salt. It was dug out of salt mines or salt marshes. It was a combination of fine sand, or other minerals, and salt. If it ever got moist or wet, the actual salt would get leached out of it, leaving behind only the sand. And what’s sand good for? Not cooking, that’s for sure. Sand was used for walkways, trails, and any place where you don’t want mud, where you don’t expect to grow anything.
So if we’re salt, what does this verse mean? What does Jesus mean by asking, “What good is salt if it loses flavor?” What would losing our flavor mean, or look like? Is this about Christians who used to be “salty,” and now aren’t? Is this about how Christians can lose their salvation?
No. Relax. Jesus just said, “You are the salt of the earth.” He didn’t say, “You were the salt of the earth.”
When Jesus speaks to His students, He speaks to students of all levels: newbies and old-timers, shaky followers and dedicated followers, pew-sitters and overzealous radicals. Once they’re listening—just as they were listening to the Sermon on the Mount—He tells them, “You are the salt of the earth.”
What good is flavorless salt? Well, it’s not really salt; it’s sand. It’s useless for flavoring, and isn’t used for flavoring. But we’re not that. We’re salt. We flavor things.
This verse isn’t really about losing anything. It’s not about how you were useful, or how you might lose your usefulness. That’s reading far too much into a rather simple little mini-parable. Don’t over-analyze Jesus’s words, and construct some zany theology about eternal security based on stretching the hint of an idea to the breaking point. Just concentrate on being who you are. You’re salt. Flavor the world.
Mt 5.13: ὑμεῖς ἐστε τὸ ἅλας τῆς γῆς· you all are the salt of the earth; ἐὰν δὲ τὸ ἅλας μωρανθῇ, ἐν τίνι ἁλισθήσεται; & when the salt makes insipid [or stupid], in what [way] will it be made salty? εἰς οὐδὲν ἰσχύει into nothing it is able, ἔτι εἰ μὴ βληθὲν ἔξω καταπατεῖσθαι ὑπὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων. yet if not, it was thrown outside to trample under the humans.
