MT 5:13-20

Matthew in the Margins…Epiphany5…Revised 2020

Does Jesus ask Mary one day why her stews always taste so good? Does she answer  “It’s because I always add a little salt - dear as it is - to make it zing.” May this kind of domestic discussion lead to Jesus calling us in our turn to become Zing? In a world that’s lost its taste for God, & needs to rediscover, savour, what God ‘tastes’ like?

As a teenager, we lived close to a Salt Refinery for some years. Water was pumped from the bay into big holding ponds, dried, harvested, taken into the factory, refined,   with packaged, & sold to us in the grocers. Salt was pretty ho-hum!

Years later, my wife & I are introduced to salt with real zing in it. Pink, & mined from ancient OZ deposits. We’ve bought nothing else since, for our grinder on our table. Jesus, though, isn’t interested in what kind or colour of salt we eat, but that we become the best-possible salt for the world! People zinging with the flavour of God! 

Originating in LEV 2:13, the idea of salt being an essential part of sacrifice flavours not only our passage, but our working & worshipping lives. William Barclay¹ refers to a practice in some synagogues that apostates wanting to be received back into the fold had to lie across the doorway of the meeting place, & that some early churches copied that idea. The point being that salt that's lost its ‘saltness’ is fit only for trampling.

 Could we sneak, ‘A Form for Stomping on Penitents’ into our next P.B? Seriously, let’s avoid such a fate by zinging with God as we keep covenant with Him!

In Jesus’ day dark is dark & light is light & never the twain shall meet. This contrast lies behind all the dark / light imagery in the Gospels. Similarly, there’s no mistaking ‘salty’ Christians lit with God from within. Christians who zing with God!

Brian

Afterthought: Smith’s Crisps apparently didn’t take off in England until a paper twist of salt was included with each packet of crisps. Maybe we could imagine the Church as a giant packet of crisps including us as the salt that makes it - us - zing?

 ¹ Daily Bible Readings ad loc., Church of Scotland, undated, p.117