Salt of the Earth

You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?  It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. Matthew 5:13

In our Sunday Christian education class, we have been working our way through John Stott's book, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount.  As I have been reading through the chapter on Jesus' affirmation for Christians to be the salt of the earth, agents who hinder social decay, I thought the following quotations were worth sharing:

"Now Christians are set in secular society by God to hinder this process [of social decay].  God intends us to penetrate the world.  Christian salt has no business to remain snugly in elegant little ecclesiastical salt cellars; our place is to be rubbed into the secular community, as salt is rubbed into meat, to stop it going bad.  And when society does go bad, we Christians tend to throw up our hands in pious horror and reproach the non-Christian world; but should we not rather reproach ourselves?  One can hardly blame unsalted meat for going bad.  It cannot do anything else.  The real question to ask is:  where is the salt?" (p. 65)

"What does it mean in practice to be the salt of the earth?  To begin with, we Christian people should be more courageous, more outspoken in condemning evil.  Condemnation is negative, to be sure, but the action of salt is negative.  Sometimes standards slip and slide in a community for want of a clear Christian protest.  Luther makes much of this, emphasizing that denunciation and proclamation go hand in hand when the gospel is truly preached:  'Salting has to bite. Although they criticize us as biters, we know that this is how it has to be and that Christ has commanded the salt to be sharp and continually caustic. . .If you want to preach the Gospel and help people, you must be sharp and rub salt into their wounds, showing the reverse side and denouncing what is not right. . . The real salt is the true exposition of Scripture, which denounces the whole world and lets nothing stand but the simple faith in Christ.'


Helmut Thielicke takes up this same theme of the necessarily sharp or 'biting' quality of true Christian witness.  To look at some Christians, he says, 'one would think that their ambition is to be the honeypot of the world.  They sweeten and sugar the bitterness of life with an all too easy conception of a loving God. . . But Jesus, of course, did not say, 'You are the honey of the world.'  He said, "You are the salt of the earth.'  Salt bites, and the unadulterated message of the judgment and grace of God has always been a biting thing.'" (p.66)