“If salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned?” It is no longer good for anything.” (Matthew 5.13)
Sharing stories of her growing-up years, my mother often spoke of the brine barrel in the cellar of the old farmhouse. Since I was unfamiliar with such a thing, she had to explain its function, its rationale, and its maintenance to me, more accustomed to frozen foods, and fresh meats, and super Walmart’s.
As she explained, a strong wooden barrel, held together with metal bands on the outside, much the same as an old barrel in which bourbon is aged, would be filled with brine water, a solution made up of water and salt. Generally, it was a high concentration of salt, sometimes with as much as twenty-five percent salt in the solution.
The purpose of the brine barrel was to preserve meat. Once a hog from the pen near the barn had been butchered, slabs of meat and racks of ribs were placed into the salty solution in the barrel, ensuring that the meat would not spoil, allowing the family to have meat on the table for months, instead of just for a day.
Curious and confounded by something so different from my own experience, I once asked my mom how Grandma knew just how much salt to put into the water. She answered that Grandma had a simple test to decide if there was sufficient salt. She would put an egg into the water. If it floated to the surface, there was enough salt. If it stayed below the water, she added more salt.
Her job as a child, my mother said, was to go to cellar, lift the lid from the brine barrel, and with long tongs pull out a rack of ribs, carrying the portion into the kitchen, where my grandmother would prepare the meat for the family on the old stove top. Listening to my mom, I found it difficult to imagine how she found the meat so tasteful and such a feast, as she clearly did.
She understood, as modern people may not, how important salt was in a day before modern conveniences. Like all generations before her, going back to ancient times, salt was highly valued. It was used as a preservative, preserving meat before the age of refrigeration. Also salt was thought to have curative powers, preventing diseases.
So important was salt in the ancient world that it was considered the most valuable commodity, bought and sold, its production often monopolized by certain countries, such as Egypt and Persia. Roman soldiers were paid with packets or bricks of salt, the Latin word being sal. In fact, our word “salary” comes from this Latin word, the origin rooted in these salt payments made to soldiers. The phrase we still use sometimes, “worth his salt,” has the same origin.
Retrieving this long history of the significance of salt, we can better understand the Galilean Rabbi’s insistence to his followers that they must be “the salt of the earth.” Using salt as the image of the disciple’s life, he urged upon them a way of life that worked its way into the world through good and virtuous deeds in the same way that salt flavors food.
Also, as salt was a preservative, so the disciple was expected to live his or her life in such a manner that they were preserved from the corruption of the evil forces in this world. Their lives, in short, were to be unspoiled, not weakened by the wickedness of the world, not tainted by the enticement of sin, not corrupted by the corrosion of wrongdoing.
For this same reason, salt was a part of the baptism ritual for all newcomers into the community of believers for centuries, discontinued only a half century ago. Towards the beginning of the baptismal service, the priest placed a pinch of salt into the mouth of the child, offering this prayer at the same time, “Take this salt as a sign of wisdom. May it be for you likewise a token that foreshadows everlasting life.”
Even if our baptisms today do not contain this ritual of salt within them, we still are obligated by the same command of the Teacher who placed this ordinary, but significant image before us, insisting to us that as salt does good for people’s lives, so we must do good for others, and as salt fights decay, so we must do battle against the decadence that surrounds us.
A cartoon from years ago showed two figures speaking to one another outside the door to a house. One says to the other as they enter the house, “As it says in the Good Book, Bob, you are the salt-substitute of the earth.” While the comic plays on our modern health concerns with salt, it does not reflect the Rabbi’s teachings, whose words make it clear that there is no substitute in the world for salt.
Should the disciple fail to become the salt of the earth, then the world loses that special flavor that only salt can bring to it, becoming bland and bleak, a place without the richness of good and greatness that the disciple pours into it by a life lived well. It loses that something more that makes us believe there is still something worthwhile and worth living for in this world, something more than just more ugliness and more selfishness.
Not too long ago, a man–advised to cut down on his salt intake–learned soon enough that when he tried a salt-free diet, he found food to be flavorless. “No salt, no taste,” he said, much to his disappointment. He admitted, “I was stunned at what a difference just a few grains of salt can make.”
His words, consonant with the Rabbi’s words to us today, urge to us make that same difference, now not in food, but in the world, where our lives become those “few grains of salt” that bring a better life to others, giving them a world with the taste of goodness in it, rather than the everyday experience of a tasteless place without compassion, without concern for others, without care for anyone but oneself.
How, then, do we bring that restorative taste of salt into the lives of others? We might find the answer in the words of the ancient prophet of Israel called Isaiah, also recalled to us today, an intentional pairing with the words of the Galilean Teacher, telling us just how we can become the salt of the earth.
“Share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless; clothe the naked when you see them, and do not turn your back on your own. If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech, if you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted, then light shall rise from you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday.”
These instructions become for us the pinches of salt that we can put into the stew of the world, flavoring it in a way unlike any other, offering it something more, something better, something different. When we choose to form our lives in such a way that our daily actions reflect the way of the Galilean preacher, then we will be the salt of the earth, as he was the savior of the world.
The Rabbi did not say it would be easy, he only said that it was necessary. As we find it difficult to imagine our world without salt on a pretzel or salt on a margarita glass, so this world would be a far less decent place without those disciples who have decided to become the salt of the earth.
The 19th century British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, once wrote these thoughtful words about such decent people, “But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed.”
So, the next time we grab the salt shaker, we may want to think about how those few grains of salt can make all the difference in what we eat, or when we savor for a moment the flavor of salt in our food, we may want to see how salt makes better everything we eat. Then, in that moment of awareness, we might ask ourselves if we have become the same gift of salt to other people’s lives, making everything better for them, giving them something more than they had.
—Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 