Salt and Light

5th Sunday, A

“You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.”

Thus the Lord Jesus – after the Beatitudes, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount – describes to us, his disciples, our identity and our task in this world.

Let’s take the light first.

The life and commitment of Christians, that is, of the Church, is very well described at the beginning of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of the Second Vatican Council, which is called Lumen gentium, “Light of the nations.”

“Christ is the Light of nations. Because this is so, this Sacred Synod gathered together in the Holy Spirit eagerly desires, by proclaiming the Gospel to every creature, to bring the light of Christ to all people, a light brightly visible on the countenance of the Church.”

Christians should always have this zeal for the illumination, the enlightenment of humanity with the light that is Christ.

At the beginning of the Easter Vigil, as the paschal candle processes into church, the deacon sings, The light of Christ. To say that Christ is light means that we see things clearly in the awareness of Christ’s presence. We understand and interpret ourselves and all created things correctly in the light of God made flesh, the divine person Jesus Christ. The mystery of our human existence, nature, and all things only make sense if we see them in Christ and with Christ. And this is because, as the prologue of the Gospel of Saint John announces, Jesus Christ is the Word of God, and "all things were made through him." (1, 3) Therefore, as everything was created through him, nothing is understandable without him.

It is precisely in this sense that Christ is the light of the world. Our quote from Vatican II says that the light that is Christ shines on the face of the Church.

This shining is our joy and our mission.

Our Christian call is to live like a little mirror. We receive the divine light in prayer and in the sacraments and then we reflect it, so that we shine and this light shines on others and on the world. That is our call to be the light of the world.

Now, the salt.

Salt is still used as a food preservative, but much more so in ancient times, when Jesus lived his earthly life. And this is part of the meaning in which we can understand our call to be the salt of the earth.

Salvation and all graces come to us from the incarnation and the passion, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. And we received these graces through our baptism and continue to receive them by living a life of the sacraments.

But it is up to us to preserve, protect, and safeguard these gifts of God with our faith, prayer, and devotion. In this sense, we could say that our faith is like salt, because it preserves the graces received. A life of prayer and faith is the preservative for the gifts of God already given; it’s what keeps these graces fresh.

In his homily during the Mass for the beginning of his ministry, which happened to be on the feast of St. Joseph, Pope Francis, speaking of the example of Saint Joseph, put it like this:

“In St. Joseph, dear friends, we learn how to respond to God’s call, readily and willingly, but we also see the core of the Christian vocation, which is Christ! Let us protect Christ in our lives, so that we can protect others, so that we can protect creation!”

The verb in the original Italian of the homily translated there as protect is custodire. You can see in there the English word custody. It has the sense in Italian of keeping something safe, protecting, guarding, even cherishing, and that is our vocation as the salt of the earth: to safeguard and cherish the presence of Christ in our lives, so that through us Christ may safeguard others and creation as our common home.

So, let us rejoice and embrace our vocation as the salt that preserves the grace and presence of God in the world, and the light that shines on the face of the Church so that our light may shine before others.