Mt 5:13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt has become tasteless, with what shall it be salted? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.”
Even if those who are persecuted are to be called blessed, the question nevertheless always remains whether it would not be more prudent—and indeed better—to avoid persecution by cultivating the new life, that is, Christian knowledge with its beatifying consequences, quietly for oneself out of love of peace, and to preserve it as a sacred secret from the evil world until the day of the victorious manifestation of the Messianic kingdom.
Jesus Christ counters this idea by showing his Apostles, through a twofold parable, the unavoidable necessity of working publicly for the Kingdom of God. One can be peaceable without fleeing the world, for peaceableness is not cowardice, but rather the guiding principle for the courage which must always impel the Apostles to share their newly won life with the whole world.
This must be done—and indeed both for the sake of the Apostles themselves and for the sake of the world. Jesus highlights the first point in the parable of the salt, and the second in the parable of the light which follows, when he says: You Apostles must preach, for you are the salt of the earth; you must preach to the world, for you are the light of the world.
Since this is the immediate motive for which he employed a double image—because a single image would not suffice for both applications—we must, in order to understand the whole correctly, observe:
first, in what salt and light are alike;
second, in what they differ.
The former was the reason for their conjunction in order to express one truth; the latter the reason for their separation, namely, to bring the individual aspects of the represented truth more clearly to light.
What both have in common is the power inherent in them which manifests itself everywhere. Salt acts upon everything; light illuminates everything wherever it comes. Influence upon others, communication, and the outflow of one’s own nature and essence belong equally to salt and to light.
With light, however—and here the difference in their mode of operation appears—the outflow of the ray can be prevented without extinguishing the light itself; with salt this is not possible. Therefore it is this latter point that Jesus Christ brings forward first with regard to the Apostles.
As soon as the power of divine life has entered into them, they must, as the salt of the earth, salt mankind; otherwise they would not be salt. Activity directed outward belongs just as essentially to the nature of discipleship to Jesus as salting belongs to the nature of salt.
Hence arises the necessity for the Apostles themselves to preach, to teach, to allow the power of salt to operate—even if it agitates the whole world and costs blood and life. Any slackening here would be a slackening and dying out of the divine life within them. But with that they would also at the same time lose their receptivity for divine life. To use another image: they would tear out the tree of life together with its root.
Therefore Jesus adds: “If the salt has become tasteless,” etc. If the Apostle ceases to preach—that is, ceases to be an Apostle—then nothing can make him an Apostle again, for there are no Apostles for Apostles, just as there are no salts for salt.
It is with the apostolate as it is with Baptism and Confirmation. For the one who frustrates within himself the effect of baptismal grace and of confirmation, there is no second Baptism and no second Confirmation.
This is the first motive for the choice of the image of salt.
A second motive is provided by the specific efficacy of salt itself. Salt preserves water, animal substances, meat, and other things from putrefaction, and thus keeps them fresh and healthy. In the same way, it is the task of the Apostles, through the life-power dwelling within them, to preserve the human race from spiritual decay, from corruption and death.
The sharpness of salt is usually not pleasant, but it is necessary. It bites, cuts, dissolves, draws together—precisely in this way holding death at bay. Is it not the same with the word of God? It is a sharp salt for human beings: it bites, cuts, dissolves, constricts; it hurts, and for that reason it is persecuted, opposed, and fled from. But precisely if it did not have this effect, it would have ceased to be a word of life.
The pagan world also possessed a certain kind of life. The preaching of the Apostles stirred it up, threw it—like salt scattered upon it—into convulsions, and first preserved it from complete putrefaction, until it was wholly won for Christ and transformed into a new life, which then had to be kept fresh, strong, and healthy through apostolic warning, exhortation, and teaching.
The transfer of the image is simple: the Apostles are the salt; the human race is the earth. What salt is for earthly things, the Apostles are for mankind.
People have asked whether salt can really become tasteless. The question has nothing to do with the matter itself. Jesus posits a case whose occurrence in spiritual life is indisputably possible. That salt can lose much of its substance, or at least change it, is certain; and that such salt is the most useless of things is no less certain. It serves for nothing other than being thrown out—that is, it is in fact dumped into the street, or, as we would say, into the rubbish heap or gutter.
In spiritual life this means exclusion from the community of Jesus Christ. Whether, however, for such a person—one who has ceased to be an Apostle—there is absolutely no salvation at all remains undecided here. Certainly, there is none so long as he has no desire to become an Apostle again, that is, so long as he does not repent. But of the impossibility of repentance there is no question here. Every parable may only be pressed to a certain degree; pursued further, it is exhausted and over-interpreted.
We may indeed say that conversion is difficult for such a person, but we must not go further, for other than the given relationships were not in the mind of Jesus. And the word always remains true: with God nothing is impossible.
That the Apostles must teach courageously, without fear of contradiction and persecution, and communicate their spirit to all, is also a necessity for the world. Jesus Christ makes this clear in the second parable, as he continues:
Mt 5:14 “You are the light of the world,” that is, the sun in the spiritual life of humanity. Just as the earth needs the sun, so humanity needs you. Without you, the human race would remain without light.
Light is first of all an image of knowledge—but of that true knowledge which gives life. Therefore it is at the same time an image of the Spirit, that is, of the Holy Spirit, who is communicated to humanity through the Apostles and gives it new life.
The gifts of the Holy Spirit are also, in constant ecclesiastical language, compared with the rays of the all-quickening spring sun. One need only recall the magnificent hymn Veni Sancte Spiritus and all the hymns and prayers of the Church to the Holy Spirit.
In the strictest and proper sense, Jesus could say this only of himself: “I am the light of the world,” as he himself testifies (John 8:12), and as the fourth Gospel depicts him: “In him was life, and the life was the light of the world” (John 1:4). His Spirit is the Holy Spirit; he gives life to the world; he is its only eternally shining sun.
If, nevertheless, he transfers this same image to his disciples, this happens because—and insofar as—they represent him and form the organs through which the life-giving power of his work of redemption flows to the nations.
Mt 5:14-16 “A city cannot be hidden that is set on a mountain; nor does one light a lamp and place it under a bushel, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. So let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”
These two new comparisons contain nothing that was not already expressed or at least indicated in the previous ones. But in his condescending pedagogical wisdom, Jesus takes them up in order to impress once again upon the hearts of his disciples that nothing must hinder them in their apostolic activity.
They are—so his words imply—so destined for manifestation that they could not remain hidden even if they wished, and must not remain hidden even if they could. He shows the former by the example of a city built high up; the latter by that of a lit lamp.
A city built on a mountain cannot remain hidden. To build on a mountain and seek concealment would be a contradiction that could not possibly be resolved. So too it is with being an Apostle and remaining hidden, unrecognized, and therefore unchallenged. They must, like boldly constructed cities on the heights, look the world freely in the face and allow themselves to be seen.
This is of great importance for the priest. Even if he did not wish it, he is like a city set upon a mountain; he cannot deny himself. As a priest he cannot remain hidden; the whole world sees and knows him. How foolish, how fruitless it is to want to conceal or disguise the priestly dignity!
The second image is exceedingly gracious. In it Jesus shows that the Apostles would be acting against their obligation if they were to withhold from the world the good entrusted to them. He connects it with the preceding image of light, but with the transition to the light of the lamp, which alone fits his comparison, when he says: You are the light of the world.
If, however, you wished merely to enjoy the light for yourselves—if you wished to enjoy for yourselves alone the graces and blessings whose bearers you are—you would resemble a lamp that delights in its own light under a bushel, while everything in the house remains dark.
That could not have been the intention of the householder when he prepared the lamp. The house is the world; its inhabitants are human beings; the householder is God; the lamps are the Apostles. Upon them the oil of the anointing of the Holy Spirit is poured out, so that they may shine joyfully and bring the whole world to the knowledge of Jesus Christ.
For the understanding of the parable itself, note the following. The lamp burned, as still today in Egypt, throughout the night. It stood on a lampstand, which was usually fastened to the wall. If one wished to create darkness without extinguishing the light, one placed the lamp on the ground and covered it with a vessel. Jesus names the modius, that is, the bushel, more precisely the mezen, a small grain measure found in every household.
As simple as the image is, so simple is the application Jesus Christ makes of it to his disciples. “So let your light shine,” that is—as he himself explains—your good works.
By this, however, he does not mean what we call a good work in the narrow and individual sense, but the entire apostolic activity. What they do as Apostles in their vocation is one great good work, which by its very nature must become visible to people.
Already this, and the addition “that they may glorify your Father in heaven,” shows that the warning in Matthew 6:1 does not contradict this exhortation. The works against which Jesus warns later in his discourse (see Matt 6:1) and those to which he exhorts here have completely different ultimate intentions.
The final purpose of all apostolic activity is the glorification of God—that is, the effort to bring all people to the knowledge of God and thus to reunite them with God, so that their being and life, their thinking, speaking, and acting, may become an unceasing praise of God in their own sanctification.
What was said from verse 11 onward, as we know, applied especially to the Apostles, without excluding the other listeners. In what follows, Jesus again turns to all and teaches them what the one group need not fear in his preaching of the Kingdom of Heaven, and what the other group should not expect.
The strict-minded, Pharisaically trained among his hearers could fear that, through Jesus’ utterly unprecedented appearance and the distinctive manner of his teaching, the Mosaic faith itself might be endangered. The free-minded, on the other hand—that is, the Sadducees and those Jews influenced by the Hellenistic spirit—might hope that the strict, exclusive orientation of the old Law would finally be abandoned, and that thereby a path would be opened toward an accommodation with the pagan, universal worldview.
Against such a possible—and indeed likely—misunderstanding of his activity, Jesus Christ speaks out already in this, his first connected discourse, when he says…
CONTINUE last paragraph
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