New Thoughts About Salt And Light And Us

Saturday of the 14th Week in Course 2023

The word “wisdom” appears over 300 times in the Sacred Scriptures. That’s one reason that my wife and I pray every morning for the wisdom to know God’s will, and the other virtues we need to carry it out. St. Paul writes the word a couple of dozen times in five of his letters to the churches, and most of those occurrences are in his first letter to Corinth. Look at these three verses we just heard: “among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” The secret and hidden wisdom of God is contained in His plan to free us from the bondage of sin and death, to make us free in Christ to do good and avoid evil and build for Him a holy Church. The rulers of this world, from Caesar down to our day, would never have killed Jesus if they knew just how badly their corrupt power would suffer from His sacrifice, and how the freedom of the children of God would ultimately bring them down.

That freedom was won, and is celebrated here, today, by God’s Son, Jesus Christ, Beloved of the Father. He gave Himself over freely to evil humans, was judged unjustly, sentenced unjustly, and murdered unjustly. But when humans had done their worst to Him, He rose on the third day and offered each of us who believe in Him a sure path to being like Him, baptism into His Mystical Body and a life of obedience in faith. That is the plan that proves the unimaginable love of God for us.

In our obedience, we are called to be salt and light. You may have hears how important salt was to the ancients for preserving meat. But over the past decades we have also learned how sodium functions to keep our cells and hearts working correctly. Light we know makes it possible for us to distinguish faces, read the Word, accomplish mission. But it also keeps us healthy by regulating our bodily circadian rhythms, making vitamin D-3, and the like. So we function in the Body of the Church in similar ways. Give thanks to the Lord that He enables us to be salt and light for the world.