Today, after a bit of a break, we’re returning to Jesus’ longest recorded sermon, the Sermon on the Mount.
Can you remember how Jesus starts his sermon? What was his first WORD? Jesus’ first word is ‘blessed’. ‘Blessed’ means happy or fortunate. Jesus wants us to be blessed. He is going to tell us how we can be blessed.
Jesus starts off, ‘Blessed are…’ But he doesn’t just say ‘Blessed are’ once. He says ‘Blessed are’ nine times! He is VERY emphatic! Life is going to have its ups and downs, but let’s never forget that Jesus REALLY wants us to be blessed.
What Jesus says is the way to be blessed is very different to the way that most people imagine they will be blessed. Most people think that blessing comes from what we have: from money or possessions or beauty or success. But Jesus tells us that blessing comes from attitudes and actions and from things people do to us! People who are blessed are poor in spirit. They’re meek. They mourn, they hunger and thirst for righteousness, they’re peacemakers. And they are persecuted and reviled.
These are not the things we expect. To most people these things will seem completely illogical. But Jesus is the Son of God. He knows what he’s talking about!
After Jesus has finished his list of blessings, he moves on to talk about salt and light. We could think of these as our FUNCTION in the world; what we have to do. We are to be salt and we are to be light. What does that mean? Today, I’m going to look at what it means to be salt and we’ll look at what it means to be light in a future talk.
I’m going to split this into two parts. First, we’ll look at ‘You are the salt of the earth.’ What does that mean? Then, we’ll go on to ‘if salt has lost its taste’ and look at what that means.
So, ‘You are the salt of the earth.’ What does that mean?
A few days ago I bought some bacon. This time I bought some slightly more expensive bacon. It was labelled as ‘Tesco Finest Smoked Dry Cure Back Bacon’. I’m not sure that I’ve ever bought ‘dry cure bacon’ before or ever wondered about different ways to cure bacon. But because I was preparing this talk about salt, I did.
For thousands of years, until fridges and deep freezes came along, one of the main things that salt was used for was to preserve food, especially meat. Sailors going on long journeys would take salted beef and salted pork with them. That was still quite common practice until about 100 years ago.
It’s possible to preserve meat – or we can say, to cure it – by putting it into salt water – brine. Another way of curing meat is by sprinkling salt onto it or rubbing salt into it. Then it’s ‘dry-cured’. That’s how the bacon I bought had been prepared. We can also buy salted fish – and in the past people would describe it as ‘cured fish’. The idea isn’t that the fish is ill! The word ‘cure’ is related to the word for ‘care’.
So, when Jesus was speaking about salt, he was probably thinking of it as something to preserve food, probably meat or fish. The salt kept the meat or fish from going off. That means that when Jesus says, ‘You are the salt of the earth’ it means that one of our functions as Jesus’ disciples is to keep the earth from going off; to be the preservative of the earth. Quite a task!
I’m going to make two simple points about this and then we’ll go on to the next part of what Jesus said. That is a bit trickier!
The first point is that if we are the salt of the earth then it means that the earth needs salt. It means that the earth – it could be the physical earth, it could be human society – left to its own devices, will go off. It will get smelly!
The world is presently a mixed bag. There are many amazing inventions: the light bulb, the telephone, the internet, remarkable medical treatments which improve our quality of life. But there is also war, religious conflict, poverty, food insecurity, water scarcity and unemployment. What’s the overall direction? Jesus doesn’t tell us here which direction the world is going in or will go in. We can simply infer from what he said that if the world needs God’s people to act as salt, then its natural tendency is to decay.
But other parts of the Bible do tell us the direction the world will go in. Prophecies about the time before Jesus comes back depict a world that is ‘defiled by its people’ [Isaiah 24:6]. And scientists at present – not thinking about Jesus’ coming again – also anticipate a very bleak future.
The second point is that, if we are the salt of the earth then we have to be active. We can’t hold back decay if we don’t engage with the world! We have a job to do! To be salt we – Christians – should be in every sphere of society, in politics, in health, in education, in international development and so on, exerting a preserving influence. Salt has to be sprinkled on meat or fish to preserve it. It may even be rubbed in. In the same way, we need to be in close contact with the world around us if we’re going to do any preserving. God calls some of us to be ministers. But God’s calling on most of us is to be in close contact with the world and be salt and light in those contexts.
We express our Christian faith, in part, in church on Sundays. But we express this very important part of being Jesus’ disciples – being the salt of the earth – in the world around us from Monday to Saturday.
So, to recap: first, if we are to be salt then it must mean that the world needs salt. Left to its own devices, it decays. Second, to be salt, have to be in the world, engaging with the world. We have to be active.
Let’s go on to the next thing Jesus says. ‘BUT IF SALT HAS LOST ITS TASTE…’ I said this was trickier. What’s the difficulty?
Someone, perhaps a chemist, will say, ‘That isn’t possible! Salt can’t lose its taste. If it’s salt, it will be salty!’ But that isn’t the difficulty I’m thinking of. Perhaps the salt Jesus was imagining came from a salt mine. It wasn’t pure salt; it was more like a saline rock. The salt could be leached away and leave something that wasn’t very salty. Or perhaps Jesus was talking hypothetically. Either way, I don’t think there’s a difficulty in the idea of salt losing its taste.
So, what IS the difficulty? The New Testament was written in Greek. We read in our English Bibles, ‘But if salt has lost its taste…’ But the Greek text is literally, ‘But if salt has been made foolish’! That’s a difficulty, isn’t it? First of all, how can salt be made foolish? That doesn’t make sense! And second, if that’s what the Greek says, why do the translators translate it as ‘if salt has lost its taste’? One reason is that in Mark’s gospel, Mark really does say ‘if salt has lost its taste’. Mark uses a different word to Matthew. So the translators probably assumed that this was what Matthew meant. But is that correct? Could Matthew really be talking about foolishness?!
Wikipedia comments, ‘English language translators UNIVERSALLY ACCEPT that the verse is talking about flavour rather than intelligence.’
I’m sure that Wikipedia is right. I often use a website called Bible Gateway. There are about fifty English-language versions of the Bible there and every one of them translates the Greek as salt losing its taste. None of the translations talk about salt being made foolish. Salt can’t be made foolish! That would be silly! But I found one Bible scholar who argued that Jesus might really mean that the salt has become foolish.
Let’s look at what each of those two ideas means.
THE FIRST IDEA IS THAT THE SALT HAS LOST ITS TASTE. It is no longer salty. That means that Jesus’ disciples – us, in other words – can lose our saltiness. We are no longer any use as a preservative.
200 years ago, Christians campaigned against slavery. 50 years ago, Christians campaigned against apartheid. I lived in Botswana for a couple of years in the mid-1980s and met white South African Christians who were very committed to this cause. Today, Christians get involved in other causes. They campaign against racism, persecution of Christians, people trafficking, climate change and so on.
However this matter of being salt, acting as preservative, also applies to situations that are much more personal. A friend is slipping into alcoholism. Do you help him? Your son is getting addicted to video games. Do you help him? Your company is about to pressurise a supplier in a way you think is unethical. Do you speak out?
Suppose you decide to put your feet up. Then you are no longer salty. Jesus asks, ‘how shall its saltiness be restored?’ It’s a rhetorical question. If salt loses its saltiness, it can’t be restored. What happens then? Jesus tells us. ‘It’ – the salt – ‘is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.’
If Jesus meant, ‘if salt LOSES ITS SALTINESS’, then he is giving us a warning that we can lose our saltiness. We can become ineffective. If we lose our saltiness then we will no longer be any use. We mustn’t allow that to happen! If we do, we end up on the rubbish tip!
THE SECOND IDEA IS THAT THE SALT HAS BECOME FOOLISH. I said that I came across one Bible scholar who argued that Jesus really meant that salt could be made foolish. His name is Richard Thompson and he’s a professor of New Testament at Northwest Nazarene University in the United States.
All Bible translators translate, ‘if salt is made foolish’ as ‘if salt loses its taste.’ But Thompson says that he could find no other instance in Greek literature where the words salt and foolish are placed together. If there IS another place where ‘salt is made foolish’ is an idiom that means ‘salt loses its taste’, then fine. But if it isn’t then we need to think what it could mean.
Salt, in the literal sense, can’t be made foolish. But Jesus is using salt as a metaphor. In the metaphor, salt represents Jesus’ disciples. Jesus’ disciples CAN be made foolish.
That was something Paul experienced. The church in Corinth considered him foolish. He wrote, ‘I repeat, let no one think me foolish’ [2 Corinthians 11:16].
It’s true today too. Today, the media and society often cast Christians as foolish. At school, if your friends know you’re a Christian they’ll very probably think you’re foolish. You are sort-of OK if you live out your faith in a half-hearted way. But if you take your faith seriously then you’re definitely foolish. I certainly experienced that at school. The same is true of work. You fill in your tax return honestly? How foolish!
If Jesus meant, ‘if salt IS MADE FOOLISH’, then his warning is that the world around us will make us fools, consider us fools. Because ‘the world’ considers us fools, it pushes us aside, silences us and tramples on us. The salt becomes ineffective because the world rejects it.
Thompson writes, at the end of his paper:
‘this verse presents the serious possibility that the disciples … may be perceived as “foolish” and useless because of their identification with Jesus … Nonetheless, the emphatic affirmation to the disciples remains, “You are the salt of the earth,” suggesting that, even though their function may be hindered and considered useless by such treatment, they still must function in salt-like ways, no matter where they may be cast.’
Let me conclude.
Jesus has given us a job to do. We have to be salt. Our job is to preserve the world from decay. To do that, we have to engage with the world. We have to be active.
If we take it that Jesus means, ‘if salt has lost its taste’, then Jesus is warning us against becoming ineffective in our role as salt. We mustn’t drift from our mission.
If we take it that Jesus means, ‘if salt has been made foolish’ then he is warning that society can ‘make’ us – consider us – foolish. It’s difficult to be effective when that happens. But we have to function as salt nonetheless. We mustn’t be pushed off course.
The message is similar in each case. Jesus has given us a task, and we need to stick at it.
Talk given at Rosebery Park Baptist Church, Boscombe, Bournemouth, UK, 22nd May 2022.
