Salt

"Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with each other" (Mark 9:49-50).

Salt is one of the most important minerals in our lives. Americans are well aware of it’s ability to bring out the flavor in otherwise bland foods—there are many of us who can barely eat a helping of mashed potatoes or oatmeal if it has not been prepared with at least a little salt.

People who are watching their weight also know that salt in the diet causes water retention. The more salt you eat, the more water your body will hold onto. Dieters often look for products that are advertised as "low-sodium" to minimize how much "water weight" they are carrying around in their bodies.

Cooks are aware of a third property of salt; salt acts as a preservative. Since salt sterilizes bacteria, salt is used for preserving pickles, cheese, fish, potatoes and meat, without the need for refrigeration.

What most Americans don’t realize, however, is that salt is essential for human life. Salt in the diet helps the body retain water, and without water the body dehydrates and dies. Although many Americans view water retention as a nuisance, anyone living in a desert will tell you that without salt to help your body hold onto water, the dry desert will soon claim your life. No human being can survive without salt.

Because of this, history has recognized the importance of salt. Salt has been used as currency in some societies, while others levied a tax on it or even gave exclusive control of it to the government as a monopoly. Since salt is a preservative, it has become symbolic of people who will keep their promises and thus can be trusted—we call such people "salt of the earth". Our modern English word "salary" comes from the Latin word "salarium" which originally referred to the money paid to Roman soldiers for the purchase of salt so that they could stay healthy.

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus speaks of saltiness as a characteristic of Christians. He starts by saying that everyone will be salted with fire. Fire and salt have a feature in common—they both purify. Salt kills bacteria so that food is safe to eat. Fire does the same thing—cooking food over high heat kills bacteria and makes the food safe to consume. Both salt and fire kill the things that can make us sick.

Of course, Jesus is not speaking about germs here. Our Lord is warning us about the things that can make us spiritually sick—sin. God wants us to be healthy. God created mankind to live forever. But we are all sinners. We all foolishly eat things that are not good for us, things that make us sick and gradually weaken us to the point of death. We go to movies that glamorize unhealthy behaviors like smoking, drunkenness, and sex outside of marriage. We watch TV shows that emphasize relationship-destroying behaviors like insolence, disrespect, dishonesty, and divorce. We read books and magazines that claim they can tell us how we can make ourselves happy, even though they replace Jesus’ authority with a mixture of psychiatrists, nutritionists, astrologers, and mystics who cannot agree among themselves whose advice is best. Every day we are exposed to mental food that, if we take it in, tries to confuse us as to what can make us healthy and what can poison us.

We are filled with the sickness of sin, and Jesus wishes to come to our aid before the sickness kills us eternally. Jesus has been called the Great Physician—He gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, mobility to the paralyzed, health to the sick, and life to the dead. Jesus comes to each of us with the offer of healing—Jesus wants to save our lives before the sickness of sin takes us into the death of hell.

But healing isn’t always a comfortable thing. It hurts to lance a blister. It hurts to apply peroxide or alcohol to a festering wound. The strongest medicines usually taste awful. Fire will cauterize a wound, but it will hurt terribly for a while. Rubbing salt in a wound will sting badly as the germs are being killed.

People don’t like to feel pain, but a wise patient will put up with the temporary discomfort of medical treatment in order to regain long-term health. Our Great Physician asks us to trust Him. Sometimes His treatment of our sin hurts. We are asked to give up our drinking buddies as part of our new sober life style. We are asked to give up our pride in order to apologize and start rebuilding our marriage. We are asked to turn our backs on the sins that have given us so much comfort and pleasure, in order to grow healthy spiritually. Rejecting sin is hard and painful.

Jesus knows our pain all too well. Our Great Physician went through far worse than having salt rubbed in a wound, far worse than having an injury cauterized by fire. Our Lord Jesus was betrayed, humiliated, ridiculed, beaten and put to death because of our disease. Our Lord Jesus experienced the horror of having the love of God the Father taken away from Him as He hung upon the cross, rejected by God when by rights it is we who should be rejected.

Jesus went through that pain because destroying the sickness of sin hurts—and our Lord was the only one who could suffer the burden of our illness and come back from the grave that it put Him in. Jesus is alive again eternally—alive so that He can tend to the illness that rots us from within. Jesus treats us by forgiving us. All He asks is that we submit to His care, and He promises to bring us back from the death of our sins, just as He came back.

Any physician "worth his salt" will not only cure you, but also try to educate you in living a healthier lifestyle; our Great Physician gives us His prescription for life when He says, Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves. For us to stay spiritually healthy, we must have salt in ourselves.

That salt is the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ. The salt that we need to be healthy is faith in the promises of God, the assurance that when we reject sin as the way we want to live, and trust in Jesus to purify us and give us a new way to live life, God the Father will forget that we have ever done anything to make Him mad, and will send His Holy Spirit to live in us to guide us through life towards rest in heaven.

Remember the properties of salt? The first property is that it kills germs. When we have the salt of God’s Word in ourselves, we are made more resistant to the illness of sin in our lives. When we see or hear something that can sicken our soul, the Word of God gives us the ability to see through the lies and the wisdom to reject them before they lead us to make bad decisions. If we keep the saltiness of the Word of God, we better resist sin and remain spiritually healthy.

The second property of salt is that it gives food a pleasant flavor. When we have the salt of God’s Word in ourselves, it gives our lives a pleasant flavor. Lives that are full of sourness or bitterness are no fun to live, and too much sweetness can leave us feeling hungry for something with substance and meaning. The Christian life is not sour or bitter, because we have the joy of God’s forgiving love and the capacity to let go of earthly hurts and forgive as we have been forgiven. Our lives are not filled with empty sweetness, but with meaningful work in going to others in their need and applying the balm of Jesus’ holy Word to lives traumatized by sin. The life of a Christian is pleasantly flavored by usefulness and peace with God.

But the most important property of salt is that it preserves life. No one can live for long without salt. Without salt, everyone dehydrates and dies. So it is with the salt of the Word of God. Without this salt, no one can live for long; without this salt, a person will live only a few decades at most, and spend eternity in the place of death that God calls hell. Salt is a preservative. Sailing ships provisioned with salted meat could bring that meat all the way across the ocean without spoilage. Animal skins cured with salt could be made into clothing that would last a lifetime. When we are cured with the salt of God’s Word, we are assured that we can cross the ocean of life without disintegrating into decay; when we are cured by the saltiness of Christ, our coat of faith will never wear out.

Can salt lose its saltiness? The idea seems absurd, but that is just the point that our Lord wishes to make. It would be unbelievable that salt could lose it’s salty quality, but if it did, what a tragedy. What good is salt without it’s salty properties? And yet, we Christians are capable of losing our saltiness. Our Lord has cured us with the salt of His divine Word, but we can lose that quality again. We can lose our saltiness if we stay away from the Word of God by avoiding church, neglecting Bible study and Sunday School, and instead filling ourselves up on the sin-sickened messages that so often fill our theatres, our television networks, our bookstores. If we insist on filling up with the wrong things, we can end up flushing God’s salt from our system, and soon face the spectre of eternal death once more.

So have salt in yourselves. Immerse yourselves in the salt of God’s Word and avoid those things that can give you spiritual indigestion. Let Jesus purify you and preserve you, that your life might have a pleasant flavor and bring the joy of God’s salt to others.