When healthy, the body of Christ doesn’t have to be in the majority, but it must make its presence felt in the world.
“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden underfoot by men.
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. “
-Matthew 5:13-16
I wonder whether we comprehend the enormousness of what Jesus is saying here? After all, what he is saying is this:
“You disciples, standing here before me, you inconspicuous, insignificant people, you miserable little crowd (far more miserable than you realize yourselves, for I alone can see what you will do, how you will falter and fail in your little corner, how you will fall asleep when you should be watching, how you will deny me when you should confess me), you wretched little troop-you are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.”
Listen carefully: Jesus does not say, “You should be the salt of the earth” (as if we could accomplish this), but rather, “You are salt and light, simply because your Father in heaven called you to be salt and light.” Do you understand this? For it means nothing less than this: “The whole earth will be salted and lighted by you. The world will have to reckon with you. The state, industry, politics, culture, all will be within the sphere of your power.” Isn’t that enough to make one wonder if somebody here is not speaking sheer nonsense?
There is a tremendous passion in this saying.
We need to talk about Christian self-confidence in order to express this passion. It is true, of course, that he who would boast should boast of his weakness. We know that we are weak and helpless and that it is God and he alone who is powerful in the weak; but the fact remains that there he really is powerful. In them (and this means in you, in me, and in the whole of poor Christendom) he is so mighty that it produces a great trembling and vibration in the whole body of the world, just as the body of a giant ocean liner is shaken by the pounding of its engines.
The New Testament reveals this trembling to us on every hand.
Unbidden, the great scenes in which this trembling and vibrating of the world is perceivable rise before the mind’s eye. There is Jesus, the nameless Galilean, appearing before Pilate, the representative of the world’s power, and being dismissed with the miserable gesture of Pilate’s washing his hands. We can almost hear Pilate saying to himself after bothering almost more than was fitting with the case of this Nazarene, “Next case, please.” After all, this was a mere bagatelle for the state to be troubling itself with. And sure enough, the next case did come, and another and another, a whole chain of those who desired to be servants of this Lord and share the lot of their Master. They were dragged before kings and ministers and the highest courts, for the powers of this world always like to be legitimate and legal. They seek to get justice and law on their side when they want to eliminate the nobodies, the people who have neither a name nor a visible lord to back them up and yet dare to speak as authoritatively as if their “imaginary lord” had actually been given all authority in heaven and on earth.
The mighty ones do not rise from their thrones and official seats when the little people come in. Why should they? Should an elephant run from mice, should the directors of the universe and the warders of the machinery of state be upset when a few sectarians talk big? . . . and Pilate said to himself, “Next case, please.”
But look, out of this insignificant scene in the governor’s office in Jerusalem there went a great trembling throughout the Roman empire, a trembling and quaking laid hold upon the earth and shook the foundations of the world. Suddenly the question of Jesus Christ was spilled out of the saltcellar, and it is almost amusing to see Pontius Pilate, Herod, the Roman emperors, and countless philosophers and poets trying furiously to get it back in again. It had scattered salt in the world and all the scraping and chemical washes could never get it out again. But what Christ set in motion with his few Christians in that first onslaught was only the first precursory sign of the last great crash when everything will sink in ruins to a cosmic grave and God himself will descend upon the rubbled plains of overthrow. Verily, we ought to realize the tremendous claims, the soaring passion of Christian self-confidence.
We find in the New Testament more of the same kind of scenes:
We see the foolishness of the Cross rising up against the wisdom of the Greeks and regarding that wisdom, for all its impressiveness, of which even a man like Paul was well aware, as ultimately nothing more than refuse (I Cor. 1 and 2; Phil. 3:8).
We see the poor in spirit rising above the sick and drunk with power, as the pride of a king’s child may exalt itself above slavery and servitude from which it has been exempt through the gift of an incomprehensible and gracious freedom.
Even nature itself, with all the sublime power of its laws and the infinite variety of its forms, groans in travail and yearns for this freedom of the children of God, which these few poor and despised men may call their own (Rom. 8).
Yes, even the light of the sun will fail, the moon will turn as it were to blood, and the sea will be no more, with a groan the cosmos will sink into ruin. What tremendous forces and powers are these! But the little band of those whose love has not grown cold will be saved, and the catastrophe of a sinking world will not be permitted to draw them into its vortex, for they are secure in the peace of the Father.
Only One draws near to the falling world from the other side, because he is the King. And in his name Christians even now walk the earth as victors, because they die as those who are poor and yet rich beyond all measure. That’s how great Christians are! They belong to the greatest of all kings. True, what they have is a borrowed greatness, but it is greatness. The world and the lust of it (the whole monstrous world!) will pass away; but he who does the will of God (and, after all, that’s what this tiny band, almost swallowed up in the world’s mess, is trying to do), will abide forever! Do you hear that-only he will abide! Everything else will vanish. History will stop, nature will collapse, the curtain will fall; but he who does the will of God is more than world history, more than nature, more than all the peaks of intellect, more than the whole cosmos. He is more than all of this-do you understand? Even though he be one of the “nobodies,” whom the world never notices, yet he dwells beneath the Father’s good pleasure.
Starting, then, with this thought, I believe we may have gained some understanding of why Jesus made that tremendous statement that we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world and that the little, wretched band of Christians is nothing less than the very sustaining power of the world!
Now, what does this mean?
Bernanos in his famous novel, The Diary of a Country Priest, said that it is significant that Jesus did not say, “You are the honey of the world,” but rather, “You are the salt of the earth.”
To look at many Christians who are soft and effeminate and sweet one would think that their ambition is to be the honeypot of the world. They sweeten and sugar the bitterness of life with an all too easy conception of a loving God. They soften the harshness of guilt with an appallingly childish romanticism. They have retouched hell out of existence and only heaven is on the horizon. When it comes to the devil and temptation they stick their heads in the sand and they go about with a constant, set smile on their faces, pretending that they have overcome the world. For them the kingdom of Cod, that comes with the savage agonies and travail of history, the excesses of the Antichrist, and the groans of martyrs, has become an innocuous garden of flowers and their faith a sweet honey they gather from its blossoms. And this is also the reason why the world turns away, sickened and disgusted, from these Christians. People in the world know that life is harder than that, and therefore they know that it is more decent to bear the bitterness of it without sugaring it over.
But Jesus, of course, did not say, “You are the honey of the world.” He said, “You are the salt of the earth.” Salt bites, and the unadulterated message of the judgment and grace of God has always been a biting thing-so much so that men have revolted against it and even bitten back at it. It has always been easier to get along with the honey-god of natural religion. Where there is salt in a church and in its preaching there is bound to be a sour reaction against it. For salt always bites and stings at the points where we men have wounds, where we are vulnerable. We want healing without pain-and besides, we do not even want to be reminded of these sore spots. That’s why the world not only shouts for the golden calf but also for the honey-gods who will make us forget our deepest wounds.
So where there is no bitter reaction to the message, the true salt is lacking. It is a dubious sign if the world lives too peacefully with the church. It is not a good sign when people are all too admiring of their preacher, for then as a rule he has not been scattering salt from the pulpit. The people have not been bitten by that preaching; they have gone home thinking they were quite healthy and sound, that they had no wounds, and the good Lord has let them get away “with a whole skin.” Enthusiasm and excessively unanimous agreement with a sermon usually indicates that it is suffering from a serious deficiency disease.
Then, too, salt has a preserving power, the power to stop decay. Our Western world has become a world of decay and rottenness because that salt is lacking. True, we have made progress, technologically we have reached the heights, we have discovered the delights of life in this world; we love the joie de vivre of sunburned young flesh. Ah, but the worm and the canker may be in it. And what a pass we have come to with our ideal of sun-browned affirmation of life, the awful abysses a world without God can plunge into, this world enraptured with its own delights-well, we have experienced it ourselves and with such a vengeance that I need waste no more words over it.
All of us-including every conceivable freethinker, atheist, and antitheist-are still living, far more than we realize, on the Christian heritage, the “salt in the flesh” that keeps it sound. But the organism of our world has gradually used it up. That’s why we need Christian disciples who carry salt into the world and help to immunize it against the poison of decay and corruption-against all the processes which have been rather portentously called “the decline of the West.”
But there is still another important attribute of both salt and light.
Both become useful only when they give of themselves, when they are mixed with something else and sacrificed. Light goes into darkness and salt loses itself in the dough. How a few grains of salt can change a whole quantity of food or dough! From a purely quantitative point of view, the proportion of really earnest Christians to the whole mass of people in the world is comparable to the few grains of salt in a great mass of dough. And when we Christians grow discouraged; when we think how few we are, of how we stand alone in our family, the place where we work, among our acquaintances; when we are dismayed and fear for our faith at the thought that the kingdom of God which is to triumph over the world is represented by these few insignificant men and women, often enough these few old men and women, then we should take comfort from this saying of Jesus He did not say, “You are the great mass of the world,” nor did he say, “You, my Christians, shall be identical with the mass, you will be the citizenry of the world.” No, he said, “You are the pinch of salt in the mass,” and by its very nature that is a small quantity.
So, do not groan about being a solitary Christian, a small minority in a far greater pagan environment; you have been called to salt this whole godless mass.
That is the promise given to lonely Christians.
And actually, how often the power of this one grain of salt turns out to be mightily effective!
When one Christian does not laugh at a particular joke, then that salt seasons the insipid fidelity of the rest.
When this one person practices forgiveness in a company that is poisoned by intrigue and enmity, then all of a sudden there is a healing factor in the situation.
When one Christian is willing to stand up for his faith where this is hard to do, then suddenly the whole atmosphere of a meeting or group may be salted as with a fresh sea breeze and the earnest spirit may suddenly open ears that were closed before.
When one person, in a group that is shaken by fear, thinking of the terrors that may befall the world (which, of course, can happen at any moment), or simply resigning themselves to a hopeless future, when this one person radiates that peace of God which is beyond all the reason and unreason of the world, and thus communicates something of this peace of God to others simply by his presence there then the salt is doing its work in the midst of corrupting care and paralyzing dread, then the light is shining in the darkness of panic terror.
Once again we say, the solitary Christian is given a great promise: he is a grain of salt. This promise is not given to the whole mass of dough-except as it allows itself to be salted. But this one Christian not only has the promise but, since he is a grain of salt, is also the bearer of the promise. And this is his responsibility.
But, of course, if he is to share this promise and fulfill this responsibility, he must get out of the salt-celler. It’s so easy, so nice to stay in the saltcellar! This is where the good people are; here they are comfortable together, here they understand one another. That’s why it is often so hard to get Christians out into the mass of dough. They would rather let the world go its own way to corruption, and they comfort themselves by saying that it is lost anyhow. They are afraid they will be infected by the children of the world, afraid to soil themselves with politics, afraid their inner life will be injured. But, of course, the truth is just the opposite. He who stays in the saltcellar loses his saltness, not he who goes out into the mass of dough. Why don’t we take the promise and command of Jesus seriously? Many people say, “I must grow more strong, I must strengthen my own inner life, before I am ready to speak to others or confess myself a Christian openly. I would rather stay in the saltcellar.” You fool, don’t you know, haven’t you heard that the spirit of God will give to you abundantly and tell you what to say, and that you will grow only by getting out of the saltcellar? But you must get out, or else you will never find out that this is true. Your inner life grows in doing the tasks your Lord has set for you, but certainly never in the saltcellar.
Most Christians are stupid. That is to say, disobedience is always stupidity (in the full sense in which the godless are called fools), though most people think that it is wisdom and prudence that prompts them to disobedience. I noted, for example, during the church struggle with Hitler, when hard and often dangerous decisions had to be made, that when a person could not summon up the courage to be obedient and blindly trust God’s promises he always had the shrewdest arguments and most elaborate tactical reasons for making his disobedient, and in the long run stupid, compromises. So it is in this case; the Christian remains in the saltcellar because he thinks that here he will be best preserved. He wants to be wise, he wants to be sharp-and in the very act loses his saltness. Salt works, salt remains salt only as it gives of itself.
Or a Christian puts his light under a bushel simply because he is afraid that the winds that blow in the evil world, among his friends in the factory or office or school, who do not believe, will blow out the light of his faith. The fool! If he would only dare take Jesus’ promise seriously and simply leap joyfully into life wherever he lives it, he would see that the light will not be blown out by the wind, but actually rekindled, and that God, who has given his promise, will never let the glimmering candle go out. But when that candle is kept under a bushel its light helps nobody, and, what is more, it exhausts the oxygen and nothing is left but a nasty, guttery wick.
When the kingdom of God breaks in on the Last Day, God will first destroy the saltcellars and overturn the bushels; for the judgment of God will begin with the household of God. And I fear that then Christendom will present a very sad picture, a conglomeration of tasteless salt and evilsmelling wicks. And saddest of all will be that the very ones who were most religious, the very people who heard the Word of God together and knew more about the promises of God will constitute the largest contingent of this rubbish.
So, there you have it, a biting, salty truth that will sting in some pious people’s wounds. But I could not withhold it from you and myself. And it is to be hoped that no one will think it is the others who are meant.
Salt and light live and work by sacrificing and giving of themselves and not by trying to “preserve” themselves. In any case, Jesus Christ, the faithful Salt and the loyal Light, did not choose to shine in the glory of heaven and to preserve and save himself in the pleasant climate of the kingdom of God. No, he came as a light in the darkness of the world, right down into the midst of reeling, staggering, unhappy humanity. And if we are all still alive and the world is given a reprieve, and if this brief reprieve is not a last respite until we are all blown to bits by the madness of the atom bomb, but rather a reprieve of grace, then it will be solely because the one man did not remain in the heavenly saltcellar (if you will pardon the expression!) and hide himself under the divine bushel, but came down into our world and gave himself all the way from Bethlehem to Calvary. It is actually blasphemy to think that heaven is a saltcellar and a bushel. But do not we Christians act as if it were? And when we do so, are we not denying our Lord and denying the deepest intent of his sacrifice?
So salt and light have one thing in common: they give and expend themselves-and thus are the opposite of any and every kind of self-centered religiosity. Salt works and expends itself in secret, and you cannot see it operating. One thinks of the quiet, unobtrusive influence of a Christian upon his environment, his family, his associates, which he exerts just by being what he is, by being there in prayer and in love. One also thinks of what the New Testament is referring to when it speaks of those who, “though they do not obey the word, may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives” (I Pet. 3:1).
Light, on the other hand, can be seen; it works openly and visibly. And here one thinks of the church’s task of witnessing publicly to the gospel and of sending men and women into all branches of public life, in politics, industry, culture, and above all, education. God gave his only begotten Son for this world; therefore we must be light and salt for the world. And certainly the world is worth serving by our sacrifice. Why? Simply because this one man poured out his blood for it, because this one man first sacrificed himself for us all.
You must be the little grain of salt for the little bit of earth that God has entrusted to you. You must be the glimmer of light for the little world where you live and have your being.
Copyright © 1983 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
