You Are the Salt

 

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?  It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.  Matt. 5:13

Salt isn't very elegant or glamorous.  There are a lot more beautiful, intricate crystals than salt for viewing under microscope lenses.  But salt is a lot more valuable than the more photogenic snowflake or quartz or gypsum crystals.  In fact, salt is so valuable that people have fought over it, as they did in the San Elizario Salt War of 1877 in west Texas, where the issue was who owned the salt lakes.  The Mexican peasants said it was God who had put the crystals there, and therefore they belonged freely to anyone who needed them.  The were Anglo Texans, however, who claimed ownership and tried to place a tax on the salt crystals.  And so a feud broke into a full-blown war.

Salt is valuable.  I happen to like it on my tomato sandwiches and on my spinach sandwiches (cooked spinach on bread with mayo and salt--yum!).  And it's a key ingredient as a preservative in those delicious olives and capers and pickles and feta cheese.

I found in my reading about salt that it actually doesn't lose its flavor.  Back in the time when Jesus commented on salt, less-than-honest merchants would mix salt in with other substances so that it wasn't salty when the customers went to use it.  They may as well throw it out and trample it, since the "salt" mixture didn't do the job that salt was expected to do.  

Salt, on the other hand, remains salt throughout its existence.  It functions as a preservative, but even more, it brings out the distinctive flavors in whatever it's added to.  My tomatoes taste better.  I almost can't stop eating that delicious spinach. The capers make the bland pasta with sundried tomatoes suddenly flavorful. And it cuts the acidic stuff in pineapple, keeping it from roughing up my tongue but still allowing the delicious pineapple juices to delight the palate.

You get the point.  "You are the salt of the earth."  As long as you remain yourself, unmixed with substances other than what God made you to be, as long as you remain "purely salt," you should be able to do your job of helping others in the world be what they were made to be.  We are to serve as a preservative for those around us, to bring out the distinctive flavors of people with whom we interact. What a delightful job description!