Fifth Sunday In Ordinary Time, Year A- Salt

During the children’s service, the pastor was explaining that Christians are the “light, salt, and leaven” of the world. The children understood “light” and “salt,” but when the pastor asked them what “leaven” is, they were silent. Finally, young Michelle Williamson spoke up: “It’s what comes after ten.”

"You are the salt of the earth,” we hear in Matthew 5:13

Salt is for preservation. Meat in hot climates needed to be cut into slender strips that were soaked in salt solution, then hung up to dry to make what we call “Jerky.”

A “preservative in the dying carcass of a world.”

[source: 'The salt of the Earth' in covenantal perspective, Don B. Garlington, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 54 no 4 Dec 2011, p 741]

If we neglect our sanctification, we can never be salt of the earth.

E.g., “She graduated from Harvard with a degree in history- why is she teaching seventh grade in rural West Virginia?

[source: Christianitytoday.com October, 2019].

She is trying to make a difference in a poor and broken public school system more seemingly interested, at times, in indoctrination in gender ideology than Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.

There are eternal ramifications because we work as a ministry for the salvation of souls.

Salt was also used to prevent Old Testament sacrifices from putrefying into rot. Leviticus 2:13 reads: "And every offering of your grain offering you shall season with salt; you shall not allow the salt of the covenant of your God to be lacking from your grain offering.”

In the New Testament, sacrifices seasoned with salt speaks of covenant fellowship with God, which we have in the Mass. Living the Mass is about “the unbending truthfulness of that self-surrender to the Lord embodied in the sacrifice of Christ, by which impurity and hypocrisy are repelled. (Ibid, 718).

Do you swear a lot? Ephesians 4:31 says put away all bitterness, anger, wrath, quarreling, and slanderous talk, along with every form of hatred.” Colossians 4:6 says, “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone.” And Ephesians 4:29 says: “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for edifying, as fits the occasion, that it may impart grace to those who hear.”

Speech seasoned with salt is pure and holy; the salt keeps one’s words from becoming corrupted or rotten and thus off-putting to any listeners.

Salt is also for fertilizing. The “value of salt in small quantiles appears to have been known in ancient times for ‘use in arid places to help soil retain moisture, destroy weeds, make stubborn soil easier to till, and make sour grass sweeter and more appealing to cattle.’ Cato, Virgil (and others) records it’s power of improving herbage of pastures,’”as a fertilizer and it’s also mentioned in 2 Kings 2:21.

[source: Christianitytoday.com October 2019].

Pro-lifers are fertilizer for society, but it can seem like salting an open wound because the truth can sting sometimes but leads to healing by making it difficult for bacteria to grow, and infection.

E.g., many forms of hormonal birth control can be abortifacient (cause early chemical abortions) by obstructing the implantation of the newly formed human embryo in his or her mother's womb. Human embryologists, the real scientific experts in the area of human development, authoritatively conclude that a human embryo is a human being immediately beginning at fertilization - the fusion of an egg and sperm immediately resulting in a new, genetically distinct human being called a zygote. Embryos are no different in their fundamental humanity from a 5-month fetus in the womb, a 5-year-old girl, or a 50-year-old man. At every stage of development, human beings (whether zygote to adolescent or adult) retain their basic human identity as they grow through their successive stages.

[source: PRO-LIFE WISCONSIN].

Being like a fertilizer is in our First Reading too, from Isaiah 58:7-10, “Share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless…”

Salt is also a symbol of a curse—in Genesis 19:24, the Lord rained down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah but Lot’s wife, fleeing the city, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

Why did Lot’s wife defy a direct order from God when he said don’t look back?

Several Jewish sources say that her looking back was “a longing and wistful gaze, with a desire to be part of the now-destroyed culture. In looking back, she identified herself with the damned town. She too had imbibed a love of Sodom and its attitudes.” Similarly, in Luke 17:31 the disciples are warned: “On that day, let him who is on the housetop, with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away; and likewise let him who is in the field not turn back. “Remember Lot’s wife.” Luke 17:32 [Ibid, 725].