Or this: the Nearly Dead Sea. I’m on a break from crazy labour on the local kibbutz, so I’m having “fun”. Like any tourist I float, buoyed up by salt, and I have discovered pain. Every tiny cut from days of handling turkeys (the feathered kind, mainly). Ten times the salt of oceans is packed into wounds I didn’t know I had. I feel sore, alive, ridiculous. I’m vaguely aware of others whimpering nearby.
I offer these scenes to you so that you will understand what it is like for me to hear the words of Jesus: “You are the salt of the world”. The words of the Lord are always perilous, and in these the peril is acute. Declared in metaphor, our nature is revealed to us. We are potent, dangerous, potentially lethal, especially in concentration (the Pan!), and even in the work of healing (the Sea!).
Hear my confession, so that you know I am in earnest. I’m terrified of the Lord’s metaphors. As a young man—inspired by Ricoeur, persuaded by J.M. Soskice—I concluded that metaphor must “leap the gap”, naming “the real” in some way. I thought: in the mouth of the Son of God a metaphor is an apocalyptic utterance. It surely has infinite weight, straddling worlds. So it is still with me: when I hear the Lord say, “You are the salt of the world”, the spheres draw close. I am exposed, declared, disclosed. I bend to sniff at my skin: are there notes of mineral and brine? We are salt, then.
There are many ways to parse out the properties of salt. For my part, I am drawn to apocalyptic themes. I say: salt is the condiment that falls into the ground and dies. I say: salt is the spice that loses its life in order to find it. I say: salt is the seasoning that takes up its cross daily and follows Christ. To do its good and godly work salt must yield its life, its pursuit of individual or collective significance, must become what it offers to others. I say: salt surrenders any claim to inherence for the grace of being what it truly is: an additive. An additive! For salt becomes itself only when added by someone; by Someone. And it is that Someone who gives salt the inalienable flavour it carries: a flavour “full of grace and truth” just as he is (John 1:14).
The Lord is not riffing, but revealing: we are the salt of the world! As salt, we are added into Babylon and into Jerusalem; we are added into families of blood and families of covenant; we are added by scattering across the face of earth, laid down in the march of generations through time. As salt we are inherent to none of this; but we are added, by the unimaginable hand of the Lord himself, the great Scatterer of salt. And as salt, we find that we lose our lives only to find them; that we have fallen into the ground only to rise fruitful; that we have become ourselves in being spent for others.
Wherever and whenever we are added in this way we bring change. He scatters us upon nameless sites of pain and longing, and lo! An altar is made; the Spirit draws near. He sprinkles us in stews of dull uniformity, and lo! Every hidden ingredient, the rotten and the pure, stands forth. He packs us into open wounds of every kind, and lo! Though every nerve protest, the sickness is stopped, and healing begins.
We see this in the biblical history of God’s people, where there is more scattering than gathering. The years of dwelling in the Land are few; the years of exile and diaspora are many. Yet in the exile we see the scattering of salt and its effects. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were added to the royal Babylonian court, and their saline influence—full of grace and truth—is well-known. But Jeremiah wrote to all that first generation of exiles in a letter, recorded in Jeremiah 29. There the Lord declared—in a verse we pass around gaily—“For surely I know the plans I have for you … plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope!” (verse 11). What we miss is the pointed end of the letter, in which Jeremiah assures the exiles they are not going home. Seventy years are decreed for Babylon (verse 10); two generations will live and die there. They will not return to Jerusalem, but are scattered like salt—as God’s people—in a country not their own. There they are to build houses, plant vineyards, and conduct their lives. There they are to live faithfully, seeking the prosperity—as salt prospers the stew, as salt sterilises the wound—of the city to which they do not belong.
When we turn toward family, and wonder how we might be added there as salt, we find acute need and discomfiting challenge. Years of pastoring among couples and families has taught me: there is a profound want of salt. Everywhere I discover sites of longing and pain, where salt might make an altar. Everywhere there are long-simmering stews of doubtful flavour, where salt might draw out goodness and lack. Everywhere I am shown infected wounds, where packed-in salt might avail.
But here is the challenge: salt can only be added, and this by the hand of the Lord. How can we be added when we already belong? How can we be salt when we are already sumac, or cumin, or coriander: when we are essential and inherent and embedded and at home? To depart from metaphor: how can the Lord make us agents of grace and truth, uncompromisingly his, when we are so greatly beholden, so deeply embedded – when we belong so inescapably?
Yet for those in Christ the question of belonging is moot. Though we do not like to dwell on it, Jesus was no great enthusiast for “biological” family. “Hey—your mother and your brothers are outside, looking for you!” “Who are my mother and brothers?” And Jesus looks around at the disciples: “Here they are!”. Mark 3:32-34. Apparently, we are to “hate” our biological family, carefully specified in Luke 14:25, if we are to be disciples. And though the Lord is all for marital fidelity, marriage itself gets an eschatological shrug. The Sadducees, with devilish intent, spin a tale of marriage mayhem for Jesus (Matthew 22:23-30). It stars one woman, serially bereft, and seven hapless brothers who step in, one after the other, to perpetuate the family name. “In the resurrection,” they ask Jesus, “whose will she be?” But Jesus will not be drawn: “In the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage.” The Sadducees were no believers in the resurrection, but they took marriage very seriously. Jesus, rather pointedly, does the opposite.
Paul shares the Lord’s reserve on family (1 Corinthians 7:25-35). As he sees it, it is no “sin” to get married, but really, celibacy is easier (verse 28), and a better fit with the “shortened” time (verse 29). Underpinning this extraordinary counsel is a deep conviction, variously played out in his letters, that we don’t belong to this world any more; that we stand loose to its claims on us. “I’m dead, and now I live from Christ!” (Galatians 2:19-20). “We don’t look at anyone any more in human terms; if anyone is in Christ: new creation! All the old stuff has gone; everything’s new!” (2 Corinthians 5:16-17). “Circumcision, uncircumcision—none of that matters; new creation, baby!” (Galatians 6:15).
Neither Jesus nor Paul is trashing “family”; both are insisting that we set aside the conditioning of culture and society and family history so that we can see all things anew. And both are lifting the metaphor of family, like a venerable tree, from the soil of terrestrial life, and replanting it somewhere different, in the rich humus of the blood and bone of our Lord. We have a new family now: the whānau of God’s people. In the soil of God’s love, under the hand of God’s Spirit, this tree of family is intended to grow straight and true, a sign of the kingdom of God.
