Salt

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, by D. Martin Lloyd-Jones

Jesus Christ: His Life and Teaching, Vol.2 - The Sermon on the Mount, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev

DMLJ: Having seen what the Christian is, we now come to consider how the Christian should manifest this.  Or, if you prefer it, having realized what we are, we must now go on to consider what we must be.

In His Sermon, Jesus has now moved on to describe the relationship of the Christian to the world.  We are in the world; we are in society.  We cannot bow out – we must not.  But how do we engage?  How are we to act in this world? 

We are to be salt.  But what does this mean?

MHA: In the time of Jesus, salt was used primarily for two purposes: to impart taste to food, and to preserve foodstuffs (primarily fish and meat).

It was also commanded in Leviticus chapter 2 to offer salt with every offering.  Further, salt was also used for medicinal purposes: rubbing on a wound, on the newborn when the umbilical cord was cut, etc.

MHA: Without salt, food was tasteless and spoiled quickly; without salt it was impossible to offer sacrifices to God; a lack of salt meant a shortage of an important medical supply. 

Salt, to be effective as salt, must be unlike anything with which it comes in contact.  We, as Christians, are to be unlike the world, unlike others with which we come in contact.

DMLJ: Salt is essentially different from the medium in which it is placed and in a sense it exercises all its qualities by being different. … The Christian is a man who is essentially different from everybody else.  He is as different as the salt is from the meat into which it is rubbed.

Given the characteristics of salt and the uses of salt, what does this mean for the Christian?

MHA: Like the soul in a body, [Christians] are to animate the life of the world.  Like salt in food, they are called to make people’s lives rich and filled with meaning, guarding human society from corruption and destruction by enmity, hate, conflicts, and vengeance.

Christianity has had a transformative effect on all human life and human society.  Jesus’s teaching became the foundation for deep, radical changes in every aspect of human relations. 

Consider the culture that was Rome before Christianity.  Slavery was the normal course; a male citizen could satisfy his lust in any orifice he chose; unwanted babies abandoned, left to die in dirt piles and creeks; any request for some tolerable treatment was a pretext for prison or death.

Jesus did not call for an abolition of slavery; He did not call for a change in the political regime; He did not fight for social rights.  But it was through His teaching – through the salt of those who followed Him – these all came to pass.

Salt, however, cannot cease to be salty.  So, in what circumstance could it lose its savor?  If diluted with large amounts of water.  The Christian diluted by the world will lose his savor.

This has cycled many times in history, and it is cycling again today.  The salt has lost its savor, and when this happens the rottenness in the world increases – the meat becomes rotten and putrefies. 

DMLJ: The world, left to itself, is something that tends to fester.

Further, life without this Christian salt becomes insipid – without distinctive, interesting, or stimulating qualities.  In rush superficial pleasures, in an attempt to fill this void. 

Conclusion

DMLJ: …the Christian is to function as the salt of the earth in a much more individual sense.  He does so by his individual life and character, by just being the man that he is in every sphere in which he finds himself.

The Church is called to preach the gospel, to evangelize.  Yet, here is the rub – and Lloyd-Jones sees it as well: this does not mean an abandonment by Christians of unified action in the political sphere.  He points to the efforts led by William Wilberforce as just one example of many. 

Per Lloyd-Jones, while the Church should stay out of the political, social, and economic spheres, it must at the same time preach against sin in all its manifestations.  Yet, as all manner of sin is now part of the political discourse, parsing this distinction, as Lloyd-Jones has, becomes almost impossible.

With his ultimate solution for this, however, I agree wholeheartedly: 

DMLJ: The main trouble is that there are far too few Christian people, and that those of us who are Christian are not sufficiently salt. …The great hope for society today is an increasing number of individual Christians.

This is always the answer.

Epilogue

Lloyd-Jones delivered the sermons that make up his book in the late 1950s.  He looks back on the century to that time, a tragic time that followed immediately after the optimism of the late nineteenth century – a time referred to as La Belle Époque, the beautiful era.  Europeans were on the dawn of a golden era, or so they thought.  Everything was advancing, improving – the Whig theory of history.

It didn’t work out this way:

DMLJ: It is a tragic century, and it is tragic very largely because its own life has completely disapproved and demolished its own favourite philosophy.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained in his 1983 Templeton Address when addressing these same twentieth century catastrophes: “Men have forgotten God.”