Fifth Sunday after Epiphany A; 02.08.26; Dr Matthew (Matteo) Carter, Seminary Intern

Isaiah 58:1-9a 1 Corinthians 2:1-12 Matthew 5:13-20 Psalm 112:1-9

Salt of the Earth

Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?”

I love to cook, especially Italian food. I love letting a tomato sauce simmer and stew for hours, making the whole house smell like garlic and soffritto. The longer you let something simmer, the deeper its flavor. A five-hour marinara will taste better than a four-hour marinara, every time. You can depend upon it. Provided, that is, you use salt. A slow and steady application of salt, small dashes of salt throughout the simmer, makes every single constituent flavor better. Some of us are lucky enough to apprentice, but most of us home cooks learn this by trial and error. It isn’t easy, although it sounds easy.

So it is, or may be, with Jesus’ two great, inspiring proclamations today in the Gospel of Matthew: You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world. Such simple metaphors, taken from everyday life; such simple language: they seem like they shouldn’t require much deep analysis. After all, paraphrasing a passage is a kind of interpretation. We at Grace Keswick, or we the Episcopal Church, could perhaps agree that the verses mean something like this:

“Each of you, each of us, has a unique flavor to contribute to this life; each of you, each of us, has an inextinguishable inner, divine light. Offer and do not conceal what is unique about yourself, the flavor and the light. Namaste.”

And off we could then go,to our respective Super Bowl parties, having heard a good word.

I call it a good word because I do find such a paraphrase comforting, and true, and especially lovely because it reinforces our Baptismal promise to respect the dignity and worth of every human. And yet: I still believe we must go further, and dig deeper in the excavation of meaning, because Jesus is there up on the mountain, like a second Moses, not to pat us on the head but to teach us and challenge us, in the deliberately provocative, deliberately opaque language of the rabbi: the language of parables, which operates on multiple levels and with multiple metaphors. The difficulty of this parable language is acute, but in a sense it’s also exciting, because while each generation of interpreters has to grapple with a vast inheritance–two thousand years of commentaries on the Gospels, with the Sermon on the Mount possibly the most commented-upon text in human history–we also have the opportunity to deploy all that vast panoply of scholarship the better to understand our own age and time.

I offer just one detailed example of how our Gospel passage is susceptible to deep reading, the half verse which in our translation is Matthew 5:13b “but if salt has lost its taste”. We need to look at the Greek.

In case that last sentence fills you with dread or ennui: I profess, fervently, that I know the difference between a homily and a Greek grammar lesson. I adore the Greek language and its literature; I have read Greek nearly every day, for pleasure, for the past thirty years; my proficiency in Greek won me the scholarships that funded my undergraduate and my postgraduate education; the Spirit convinces me that my fluency in Greek should be a real part of my ministry. I have no wish, in other words, to hide this little light of mine under a bushel-basket. And yet: if I were to spend a long time quoting the Greek, I would be (to continue a metaphor) oversalting my dish. Less is often more. Complexity is not inherently preferable to simplicity.

So here is just one tiny pinch of Greek, one iota, not even a handful: The single word where English uses three, “lost its taste”, is μωρανθῇ (transliterated, mōranthē, and accented on the final syllable), a verb used by Greek writers to describe the behavior of people, not things or chemical compounds. In this human context, it always means, fundamentally, “become foolish” or “become dull” whether temporarily (for example, having too much to drink at a party and playing the fool) or permanently (for example, the cognitive decline people sometimes experience as they age). This Greek word, mōranthē, shares a root with the English word “moron”, used pejoratively always, of people we find to be less cunning than ourselves. But salt has no native intelligence. Jesus is using language poetically here, ascribing human qualities to the natural world. Jesus’ parable style is effective because it combines familiar words and ideas in startling new ways.

The very same Jesus, Jesus the poet, who loves the poetry of the Psalms so much that he quotes them in conversation and debate (more than he quotes any other book of the Old Testament) meets us where we are, with words and images that don’t send us running to the dictionary. But he also challenges us to reassess and reevaluate what we know or think we know about our lives, by shedding new light on what we find familiar. And what would have been most familiar to an early first-century audience under Roman rule and Torah law was this: salt was precious.

Salt was valuable, and rare enough that Roman soldiers were often paid in salt: that’s where our word “salary” comes from. Salt rendered sacrifices acceptable in the temple; preserved meat to keep whole communities fed and nourished; just as importantly, made bland grub into a meal, transformed the merely nutritious into the fully delicious. I don’t know about you, but I for one am convinced that God wants us in our lives to experience deliciousness, and succor, and the pleasure of sensing that our sacrifices are acceptable. I believe that joy and relief were just as much a part of the Feeding of the Five Thousand as the food itself. Joy in the sense that yet again, the God of our ancestors has sustained us in the wilds.

With these verbal details in mind, perhaps we may attempt another paraphrase–and I don’t mean to exclude for a moment other salient and erudite interpretations, because the list of luminaries who have written whole books about our passage includes Martin Luther and Pope Benedict XVI! But I still dare to hope that a dash of Greek may help us to see a part of Jesus’ teacherly purpose:

“Each of you is precious, but if you fall into foolishness (i.e., if you don’t take my teachings to heart), you will find yourself downtrodden.”

Here Jesus describes, in a veiled way, danger at the hands of leery, non-Jewish people, danger at the hands of a local oligarchy that neither knows about nor cares about what he and the disciples hold dearest. The sense of peril will grow and deepen as the Gospel of Matthew unfolds. There may even be a hint of foreboding in his calling us “the light of the world” because he knows what is to come: in Matthew 27:45 “From noon on, darkness came over the whole land.” Even the brightest light can be extinguished. Even the sharpest minds can grow dull. But even though our great Teacher will, eventually, depart the classroom of this world, we have the honor and the privilege and arguably even the moral duty to pore over his teachings. Extra time with Holy Scripture, extra hours spent mulling over the language, the idioms, the Jewish inheritance, the poetry, can only enhance the savor. May it fill your home and your heart. May it be so.