Becoming Salt that Glows, 10th Tuesday (II), June 9, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Ephrem, Deacon and Doctor of the Church
June 9, 2020
1 Kings 17:7-16, Ps 4, Mt 5:13-16

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we continue with three weeks of prayer about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which sketches out for us the way to live as Christians. Today we come to a dual vocation he announces for us: as salt and light. For me it’s very intriguing that Jesus calls his disciples “salt of the earth” and “light of the world” at the beginning of his public ministry. At this point they were “barely” his disciples. It points to something, I think, very powerful. That almost by nature we’re called to be salt and light. Human beings are supposed to exhibit the properties of salt and light. Christians, true disciples of Jesus, should live these identities and carry out these missions all the more. Let’s see how.
• In the ancient world, salt had three purposes. The first was as a preservative. There was no refrigeration in ancient Palestine and so to preserve meat or fish from corruption, they covered it with salt. This points to how Christ came into our world in order to prevent our corruption and has sent us out to help others from going bad. The second purpose was as a fire starter. There was no lighter fluid or starter wood for fires in the ancient world. What they’d do is take dung and mix it with salt and light these salted dung pellets on fire. Alone, dung wouldn’t ignite, but the salt would get the whole thing started and once the dung was lit, it could burn hot for a long time. (One of the things I’ve learned from my work at the UN is that in some poorer regions of the world, dung remains used as fuel). In a similar way, Christ has come into the world in order to light a fire on earth and longs for it to be enkindled in us so that he can send us out to light the world on fire. Christians are supposed to be a fire starter. The third function was what we still use salt for today, to give flavor. A little bit of salt can make a big difference between tasty or bland food. In a similar way, Christ came to give meaning to all experiences, no matter how bland or bitter, giving us his life to the full and instilling in us his joy. Christians, marked in this way by Christ’s mercy, are meant to bring this flavor, personality, joy and life to the environments we inhabit.
• The second part of the vocation Jesus gives us today is to be the “light of the world.” There are two fundamental purposes for light. The first is to help people to see. The second is to warm. Christ has done both for us. He has come and mercifully taught us in such a way that we may walk as children of the light and be true children of the light. So the Christian life is supposed to be luminescent, like the lights on a landing strip at an airport on a foggy night that help planes land. In the midst of many walking in valleys of darkness, Christians are called to burn with the light so that others can follow us in following Jesus the Light of the World. Similarly, light gives off warmth, and Christ has come into the world to warm us by his love, to burn away whatever in us is frigid or tepid, so that we in turn may warm others by the fire of divine love. When we approach Jesus and when others approach us, we and they should feel like someone cold approaching a lit fireplace.
• Jesus points out, however, that it’s possible for salt to lose its flavor and light to be hidden. Rather than preventing corruption, starting a fire of faith, adding flavor to all human experiences, illuminating the darkness and warming the chill of isolation, we often don’t live up to our identity and mission. This can impact the priesthood and religious life, too, as an overreaction to the capital sin of pride or the phobia against “singularity.” We can think if we bring too much flavor, or are too noticed for the light we bear, we would stand out and would fail to be humble. For that reason, we can hide our gifts under bushel baskets or keep the salt in the salt shaker. That’s not what Christ is summoning us to do. Today he warns us that are salt is supposed to be good for something and our light is supposed to illumine those in the house.
• In order to live this way, we need to believe in who Christ has made and has called us to be. We need faith to conform our identity to being salt and light. Today we see examples of the salt- and light-like properties of faith and charity in the encounter between Elijah and the widow of Zarephath in today’s first reading. Elijah’s mission was to fill the ancient world with the light of faith in the one true God and to preserve people from the corruption of idolatry. The widow with faith trusted in what Elijah told her and gave all she had to feed him to preserve his life from the corruption of death even at the risk of her own, and God blessed her such that she and her son didn’t starve to death in the famine because the flour and oil didn’t run out for a whole year. And her example has become light until this very day: Jesus in the Synagogue of Nazareth praised her for her faith and her hospitality that catalyzed the miracle.
• Another example of salt and light is the great fourth century Deacon and Doctor of the Church we remember today, St. Ephrem, from Syria. He was a prolific teacher in an age of terrible heresies against the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit. At the request of his bishop, he opened up a school in Nisibis to teach the light of the faith aright and inoculate people with spiritual salt against false teachings. He was an incredible poet and songwriter, putting the truths of the faith into more than 3,000 songs so that Christians could learn and pass on the faith through music. He was called the “Harp of the Holy Spirit” because not only did he teach clearly about the Holy Spirit but taught through the Holy Spirit who led him to some of the deepest insights about the truths of our faith in the history of the Church. He expressed these not in dry theological treatises but in poetry and in liturgical and sacred music, because as Pope Benedict XVI said several years ago in a Catechesis on what we can all learn from him, he always connected beauty and truth so that the truth could be prayed liturgically. There was a union between our worship and our way of life, just as Jesus was saying between our communion with him and communion with others. In him, the salt glowed with light.
• Among St. Ephrem’s most treasured and renowned mystical teachings were his writings on the Holy Eucharist. We could say that he looked at Holy Communion as the opportunity to receive within Christ’s salt and light so that we might, in communion with him, because the earth’s salt and the world’s light. In one poem, St. Ephrem writes from the perspective of Jesus, “Take, eat, entertaining no doubt of faith, because this is My Body, and whoever eats it in belief eats in it Fire and Spirit.’” To enter into Communion with the Lord is to consume “Fire” and “Spirit,” a fire and a Holy Spirit that can burn away false notions of righteousness and help us to live according to the light of what Jesus teaches us by inscribing the truth on our hearts with fire, so that we might love what he’s taught us, make it a part of our worship and help us bring that salt out to the world with fire and Spirit. That’s the fire of the Holy Spirit that the Lord wants to enkindle in us in every “little Pentecost” of the Mass so that, united with Jesus, with not only lips purified but our lives purified, we may go out to set the world ablaze. And we do that not just with our words but we do so with our witness of the truly blessed life that the Holy Spirit makes possible.
• Today we come to Mass to unite ourselves to Christ, our salt and light, so that he can shake us throughout Manhattan and beyond and use us to ignite the world. He works a greater miracle than multiplying flour and oil. He multiplies his body and blood to preserve us from the corruption of sin, ignite us, give us his flavor so that we can bring his joy to the world, illumines our mind with his word and, as happened with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, make our hearts burn with the pure flame of divine love. He does us through uniting ourselves to him so that in tandem we may go out, as St. Ephrem did, as salt of the earth and light of the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel
MT 5:13-16

Jesus said to his disciples:
“You are the salt of the earth.
But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned?
It is no longer good for anything
but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
You are the light of the world.
A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.
Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket;
it is set on a lampstand,
where it gives light to all in the house.
Just so, your light must shine before others,
that they may see your good deeds
and glorify your heavenly Father.”

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