(The Nationalist, 29 January 2005)
Jesus called his disciples ‘the salt of the earth’. What did he mean? Salt is good for seasoning food; just a little brings out the best in it. It is used also in preserving food; pork or fish may be preserved in brine. It was used in the past to disinfect wounds, hurtful but helpful. It was used in paying salaries before money was widely circulated, given to those said to be worth their salt, a means of facilitating exchange among travellers and traders. (The Latin for salt is sal; “salary” meant a monthly ration of salt.)
What Jesus seems to be saying is that those who bring out the best in people, who preserve what is good, who help healing processes, who facilitate exchange between people – those he counts as followers.
People of all kinds perform those functions. They are Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists and agnostics. Many do not count themselves as among the followers of Jesus, and would be surprised to be considered as such. It’s like what Saint Augustine said, ‘There are many whom God has and the church does not have; and there are many whom the church has and God does not have’.
Jesus always had a soft spot for the “outsiders”, the rejects, those considered not good enough, who had not made the grade, those the pious did not want to be seen with.
Those who saw themselves as the insiders, Jesus found heavy weather; they caused him much trouble. In fact, they brought about his death. He threatened their closed arrangements. They made religion something that stifled people instead of liberating them, a matter of observances rather than relationships. What Jesus began in mysticism they ended in politics. It was the religious establishment that gave Jesus the most opposition, they who constantly sought to bring about his downfall. In the end, they succeeded. They saw that his message was universal, and their minds were locked into the local and the particular. In blunt political terms, they saw that Jesus had to die so that the whole nation not be destroyed. Destroyed it would be if it lost its special status as the exclusive chosen people of God. There was nothing else to hold it together.
If salt becomes wet, there is no use drying it; it has lost its saltiness and cannot be re-salted. Once lost, it is gone. Jesus seems to say that no one has a guaranteed position as a follower. Being a follower of Jesus is about relationships. These are dynamic, like riding the waves of the sea, the source of salt, not static, like acquiring and holding a special position by reason of religious profession.