What Makes Salt Salty?


We continue this week with our series on the Greatest Talk Ever Given. That’s probably a better way to phrase it than the Sermon on the Mount. Because as Jesus addressed his outdoor audience spread out before him on the grass, it felt more like a summer festival than a church sermon. It was a talk. But what a talk!

Last week we looked at the meaning of the first part of the talk, the series of “Blessings” known as the Beatitudes. We said that the Beatitudes are not conditions that we should aspire to, or rules that we should try to follow, but rather Jesus is teaching us that God can bless anyone - the spiritually zero, those wracked by grief, the outcast – and therefore the Kingdom of God is open to everyone. This is the Good News of the Kingdom. Nobody need be excluded.

The importance of this truth has the implication that the availability of the Kingdom is here and now. It is crucial for us to understand that when Jesus referred to the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven, the phrases are interchangeable, he didn’t just mean the place believers will go to when we die, he was talking about an immediate reality.

The Kingdom of God is wherever and whenever God rules.

When we were getting ready to move to Duncansville from Huntingdon County we prepared our boys for the move. We explained that we were going to this good church in this town called Duncansville and that we would live in this nice place. And so the boys were excited about it. We came up to meet with the Pastor-Parish Relations Committee and to see the parsonage for the first time. And we are driving into town and Michael, who was two years old at the time, said, “I want to go to Duncanville.”

And I said, “Son, we are in Duncansville. It’s all around you.”

So it is for the follower of Christ, the Kingdom of God starts from the moment you “drop your nets” like those fishermen disciples and start following Jesus. The Kingdom of God starts an inch from your face. You are walking in it. You are breathing it in your lungs. It is all around you. We’ll come back to why this is so important in a bit.

Think again about to whom Jesus is preaching. They are not the best and the brightest. They are rough and uneducated. They are smelly, and impious, and poor and rude. They have bad teeth. But Jesus takes time in his teaching to point out the natural beauty of every human being. Think of the most glamorous person you know, (Solomon in all his glory), and they are not as ravishingly beautiful as a simple flower in a field.

“Yet if God makes even the grass so beautiful, won’t he clothe you of little faith even more beautifully?” Matthew 6.30

Jesus is telling us that we are good and valuable because we are blessed by God, not because of what we look like on the outside or by how successful we become according to our cultural values. God’s blessing is for ordinary people. Jesus is telling Israel that not only are they blessed but they can be a blessing to others. In fact, this promise was made at the beginning of their history as a people:

“The Lord said to Abraham, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you so that you will be a blessing. . .and by you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Genesis 12.2-4

So God’s people are to be a conduit of blessing to others. Jesus again uses a “Show and Tell” method to illustrate this point. He pulls out a salt shaker and says:

“You are the salt of the earth.” Matthew 5.13

In the ancient world, salt was a vital necessity. It was not optional. It not only provided flavor for foods but it preserved. There was no refrigeration and Decay and rot were the great enemies of life in the ancient world. Salt was the only power to arrest decay. Mothers would rub salt on the skin of their newborn babies as a disinfectant. Salt had almost magical properties. And so it became a major item of trade. Rome would pay its soldiers in salt. We get the word “salary” from the Latin sal or salt. The Bible is full of references to salt. In the Old Testament is the story of a man named Lot who with his wife is fleeing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. But Lot’s wife is disobedient and she is turned into a ____________. And they took her with them on the journey and that’s where we got the first salt lick from. Just kidding.

Jesus is saying I want Israel to be a people of blessing to a world full of corruption and decay and death. You will arrest the decay. You will preserve what is worth preserving. You will give flavor and life to this world.

How will God’s people be this good to impact the world like salt? If we are salt, what makes us salty?

Well, it’s clear that our saltiness has little to do with our inherent goodness. If it did, then we wouldn’t be able to lose it, and Jesus suggests that this does happen.

“but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?”

In fact, Jesus is suggesting that this is what has happened to Israel. They have lost their saltiness. There were different ideas then about Israel’s purpose. Rome had a vision for Israel that was pretty much tax her for Rome’s benefit. The Zealots had a vision that involved a violent overthrow of Rome. The Sadducees had a vision that was an accommodation of Rome. Jesus really didn’t have a lot in common with those visions. The group and vision that he had most in common with was the Pharisees. And it was with the Pharisees that he had his strongest argument.

The Pharisees believed in reforming the world through God’s Law. Jesus also wanted to change the world and Jesus loved the Law. Nobody loved the Torah of God more than Jesus. Jesus was accused of breaking the law or introducing new ones but to this he responds:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.

“Truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, no one letter, nor one stroke of a letter will pass from the law until it is accomplished.” Matthew 5.17-18

In the Hebrew language the smallest letter is called a yodh. It made by two small strokes of a pen. When God changed Sara’s name from Sarai to Sara, it was done with the removal of a single yodh, two strokes. Jesus is saying that is the attention that he gives the law and every stroke of the law will be obeyed and will be completed.

But – here is his argument with the Pharisees – the Pharisees obeyed the law in its form and outward behavior but they missed the purpose of the law, which is to direct the heart to its right love. Jesus taught that the point of the law is the transformation of the heart.

“The greatest commandment is you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And the second great commandment is you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12.30-31

The Pharisees were very pious, very religious men. In fact, in terms of being religious they were the finest people of their day. But when it came to loving people, they were failures. They were lousy at it. And so their righteousness was not really righteous, it was just religious. The Pharisees thought they loved the law, but they didn’t love the God who gave them the law. And so the law couldn’t save them, it couldn’t only point out their lostness.

“The law is not the source of rightness, but it is forever the course of rightness.” Dallas Willard

So Jesus says in his talk, if your righteousness isn’t better than the Pharisees you won’t enter the Kingdom. In order to have a righteousness that exceeds the Pharisees we must be transformed in the heart. We must receive the blessing of God in order to be a blessing. We must not only act good, we must be good. And that can only happen by accessing all the power and the resources of the Kingdom that Jesus makes readily available to his followers. Jesus makes us salty.

We are the salt of the earth. No one can argue with goodness. No power can defeat love. No one can prevent you from being the salt of the earth. But we have to be out there. Rebecca Manley Pippert wrote a great book called Out of the Salt Shaker and into the World. It reminds me that Jesus called us not the salt of church but the salt of the earth.