Today is Feb. 27, Thursday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time.
We read at today’s Mass, “Salt is good, but if salt becomes insipid, with what will you restore its flavor?” (Mk 9:49).
On vacation recently, my father was reading a history of salt. The book had been passed to him by my sister. They are both salt fanatics.
In that book, the author, Mark Kurlansky, writes, “Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.” While salt isn’t exactly at the center of my plate, the way it is on my sister’s or my father’s, it’s true enough to see that salt has been at the center of civilization for millennia.
It’s good to remember salt being center-stage, when we read Our Lord’s comments about salt in Scripture. If we don’t, we’ll overlook what Jesus’s remarks really mean.
Christians are supposed to be at the center of things, the way that salt is. Salt has a totally unique, irreplaceable flavor. Nothing affects food the way that salt does.
A metaphor for the Gospel
And that’s why salt is such a good metaphor for the Gospel. (We’ve been discussing wisdom and its benefits so it might seem jarring to jump to the Gospel today and focus on salt. Bear with me.)
Nothing can replicate what the Gospel brings to the world. Too often people emphasize only Jesus’ social teachings or they emphasize spiritual or liturgical living in such a way that they forget how Jesus commanded us to live.
The Gospel’s inimitable flavor is this revelation of Jesus: Disciples must take up the cross the way that Jesus did. The cross is unmatched. Our Lord’s sacrifice is unprecedented.
When we forget that, we forget what it means to be the salt of the earth. To remember it, however, is to keep our lives salty and, as Scripture says today, will bring peace.
Let us pray,
Grant, we pray, almighty God, that, always pondering spiritual things, we may carry out in both word and deed that which is pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
