You Are The Salt Of The Earth (Part 1)

BY REV HENRY HONG

For this Sunday’s reflection, I will pick up from the last line of the pastoral reflection by Rev Goh – “During this trying time, may God protect and preserve us for Himself and cause us to overflow with His love and grace as we follow in the footsteps of our Lord as light of the world and as salt of the earth!”

Jesus on a hill near the Sea of Galilee, said of His followers: “You are the salt of the earth” and “you are the light of the world” (Matt. 5:13, 14).

Recently I came across an article written by a Christian professor Dr Suzuki on the elemental nature of salt and light which provided some helpful insights as well as spiritual lessons. *

Allow me to share the first part of these lessons this week and then next week on “You are the light of the world.”

According to Dr Suzuki, “Salt is a compound made up two elements, sodium and chlorine, technically known as sodium and chloride .... Salt was often used to preserve food, because salt inhibits bacterial growth. Preservation is achieved as salt is embedded into the moisture of food cells. So for salt to be salty and preserve, it has to be dissolved in water.”

Interestingly he observes that nowhere in Scripture do we find Jesus referring to Himself as the “salt of the earth.” If the “salt” qualification is to be understood in the sense of giving flavor and preserving life amid a world of sin, wouldn’t Jesus be the true source of abundant life and the true agency that preserves life? And so he asks, “Why, then, does Jesus never refer to Himself as the salt of the earth?”

He then shares how, “we already noted that salt is composed of sodium and chlorine. Sodium is a highly reactive soft metal that burns violently and explosively, and in contact with water also explodes. Chlorine is a greenish poisonous gas that is present in many household cleaning products. None of these atomic elements’ characteristics would be appropriate to illustrate some attribute of Jesus. But it might be argued that these characteristics describe well our fallen nature: explosive and poisonous.” How true! As we have the apostle James telling us, “But no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:8).

However, it is fascinating that the combination of sodium and chlorine gives salt –a flavour-enhancing and food-preserving product.

Here Dr Suzuki helps us to understand a spiritual lesson that we might draw from this observation: salt by itself cannot flavour food, nor preserve it.

Only when salt is mixed with water can it flavour a meal, stimulate our taste buds, and also preserve.

“Only in combination with water these characteristics of salt become operational and active.” A possible application of this characteristic of salt is that no one can ever be salt of the earth by themselves. We all need Jesus, “the living water” (John 4:10, 14), to become the useful “salt of the earth.”

In times like these with the spread of the coronavirus how can we, ‘drinking from the spring of living water in Jesus,’ be the kind of salt to the people around us? How can we, by what we say and do in Jesus’ Name, ‘preserve’ the faith of the fainthearted and ‘flavour’ the search of the seekers so that they may “taste and know that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8)?

*(Alfredo Takashi Suzuki, Ph.D., Is An Associate Professor Of Physics At La Sierra University, California, United States, Adventistworld.Org January 2020)