5th. SUNDAY
of Year (A)
(Isaiah 58:7-10; 1 Corinthians 2:1-5;
Matthew 5:13-16)
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You are the salt of the earth.
With those words, Jesus wanted to impress upon His disciples an
awareness of their dignity and responsibility.
You, He says – not the official
representatives of the Jewish Synagogue – You
who are following and hearing Me, You
who are perhaps beginning to order your lives according to My words and not
according the traditions of the Pharisees and their Scribes,
You
are the salt of the earth.
Salt was, in those days, obtained from evaporated pools by
the shore of the Dead Sea, or from small lakes on the edge of the Syrian Desert
which dry up in the summer. This salt
crust, dug from the soil, contained various impurities which, when the salt was
dissolved and removed, remained as useless refuse.
Could that be the possibly double meaning of those mysterious
following words of Jesus:
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;
a reference perhaps, on the one hand, to the obvious fact
that once the original clod of salty earth had lost its salt content nothing
but useless refuse remained; while, on the other hand, hinting at possibly
disastrous consequences if disciples were to lose their purified saltiness.
Those disciples whom Jesus was addressing as ‘salt of the
earth’ were actually following Him around and gladly listening to His words; and
they, Jesus was saying, could be purified from their earthy contagions and
become pure salt for His, and for God’s, purposes; if, that is, their following
Him were to become obedience to Him, and if their hearing of His words were to develop
into appreciation and understanding of them, and ultimately, to faith in Himself.
Disciples who are true lovers of Jesus, dear People of God, can
never be artificial, overly delicate, characters. No! They
are of-the-earth, ‘gotten’ from the basic humanity created by God, and found
originally ‘good’ in His sight’ As such,
thanks to Jesus’ saving Death and Resurrection. they can be cleansed of supervening
sin and become fully and most truly human, indeed, salt of the earth in the way we commonly mean the expression, by
the washing of Jesus’ Gospel which, even now in our days, is still to be heard
in Mother Church, and can be accepted through repentance, and embraced in the
power of His Most Holy Spirit, still available through her sacraments.
Now,
you are clean by reason of the word I have spoken to you. (Jn. 15:3)
Jesus then went on to tell them:
You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.
The picture of a city on a hill- or mountain-top, stems from
the message of the Old Testament prophets (cp. Isaiah 2:2–3) concerning the future rule of God:
In days to come, the mountain of the
LORD’S house shall be established as the highest mountain and raised above the
hills. All nations shall stream toward
it; many peoples shall come and say: “Come, let us climb the LORD’S mountain,
to the house of the God of Jacob, that He may instruct us in His ways, and we
may walk in His paths.” For from Zion
shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
And in today’s
Gospel passage we hear Jesus saying to His disciples:
You are the light of the world.
A city set on a mountain cannot be
hidden Just so, your light must shine
before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly
Father.
The light of this city of God, shining, as the prophets
foretold, in the darkness of the world, cannot be hidden; that is quite simply
impossible, for it is illuminated by the glory
of the Lord. Jesus’ true disciples are
authentic denizens of that city and so they too cannot fail to shine out -- or
in more modern terms, stand out from today’s masses who glory in the
light of the world, and, hope to taste all that it seems to offer them. And so confident are they in the light of the
world they are enjoying that they ‘demand’ the blessing of the Church of
England under threat of otherwise losing its national appellation and prestige,
or the blessing of the Catholic, universal, Church under threat of open and
vicious persecution, preceded by an intellectual muddying of the waters of
salvation for children yet unborn.
Notice however, that the disciples of Jesus do not have to
make strenuous efforts to be seen by men; indeed, Our Blessed Lord
Himself has warned them:
Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see
them; otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father. (Matthew 6:1)
For our purposes, however, a more literal translation from
the original Greek and the Latin Vulgate, puts it most pertinently:
Beware of practicing your
righteousness before men to be noticed by them.
Our Lord, therefore, said that, on the one hand, our light must shine in the sight of men,
but He also told us to be careful not to make a show of our religion, nor of
our personal piety, before men. The
light of the city of God shines out by itself, and in the same way, the light
of its inhabitants – the true disciples of, and witnesses to, Christ – will not
fail to shine and be seen, because they are a light set burning by God
Himself, and Our Lord solemnly assures us:
No one lights a lamp and then puts it under a bushel basket; it is set on
a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house.
God lights the lamp of Christ’s disciples – by calling them
to faith in Jesus --in order that it may give light to all His children in the
world; and our endeavour should be that in everything we may be true to the
soil from which we are dug – God’s original creation and the unity of Christian
fellowship – and true to the purifying word of Christ, so that we:
(may) be found in Him, not having any righteousness of (our) own based on
the Law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from
God, depending on faith. (Philippians 3:9)
Today, in our Western, God-denying and self-worshipping, societies,
people generally only acknowledge, and children are only taught about, a ‘law’
emanating from governmental authority and supported by popular acceptance. They
are societies in which people, increasingly, dare no longer publicly acknowledge
a moral difference between right and wrong: avowing only what is legal, as
distinct from what is unlawful and unapproved, and what is permitted, as against
what is dangerous and possibly criminal, such as daring to stand silently
praying even in the vicinity of an abortion clinic!!
Let us
finally look a little more closely at those who were addressed as ‘You’ in
Jesus’ words? Crowds had come to Him and
we are told that:
When He saw the crowds, He went up the mountain, and after He had sat
down, His disciples came to Him.
Then He pronounced what we call ‘The Beatitudes’ speaking in
general of ‘those who mourn’, ‘the meek’, even ‘those who are persecuted’; but
He only became directly personal in His words when He said:
Those blessed witnesses to Christ are those to whom He then went
on to say, ‘You are the salt of the earth.’
Today, our modern legislators, men of money and power perhaps,
women of renown and persuasion perhaps, are increasingly legislators not for an
equality which is impossible: undesirable for the majority, and even unviable, in
a society of free-born individuals; they are becoming legislators against faith
in general, and against Christianity in particular. Above all, however, they are becoming discriminators
against, even haters of, Jesus Himself:
Blessed are you when they persecute you and utter every kind of evil
against you (falsely) because of Me.
Today’s Gospel, calls upon all Catholics and Christians to hold
ever harder on to their ‘saltiness’:
that is, to their native human one-ness with and love for their fellows,
including even their persecutors, but above all, to the Person of Jesus the Christ,
by their endeavours to deepen and strengthen their commitment to His saving Gospel,
and by bearing public witness to Him, in the courage and strength of God’s
abiding Gift: His most Holy Spirit of Truth and Power, ever with us and for us
in the sacraments and life of Mother Church.
That was the model Paul himself gave, as we heard in the
second reading:
When I came to you, brothers, proclaiming the mystery of God,
I came to you in weakness. My message
and my proclamation were not with persuasive (words of) wisdom, but with a
demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human
wisdom but on the power of God.
Today, dear
People of God, we do not see much ‘demonstration of the Spirit and Power’; what
then, is our faith as Catholics based on mere human wisdom as is the case with
the modern German Church which wants to remain Catholic, but ‘different’: based
not on Catholic traditional values for which countless martyrs have shed their
blood over thousands of years, but on the suggestions and propositions of any Tom,
Dick, and Harry, any Molly, Mildred, and Margaret keen to vocalize and promote
themselves along the Synodal Pathway, and on the decisions of those choosing to
be prominent and influential in an extremely rich gathering of rootless
religious, nominal Catholic, but whose only stable name today is German. Or is it really, South German??
No, dear
Catholic People, though we do not today see much demonstration of Power and Spirit
so necessary for the original evangelisation of unenlightened pagans, our faith
today rests on the traditional teaching
and practice of the Catholic, Universal, Church founded upon the Apostles whom Jesus
chose, and to whom He said, ‘I have told you all that I have heard from My
Father; the Holy Spirit Whom I shall send you will recall to your minds all
that I have said to you’:
Whoever does not love Me does not keep My words; yet the word you hear is not Mine but that of the Father Who sent Me. The Advocate, the Holy Spirit the Father will send in My name — He will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you. (John 14:24, 26)
I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from My Father. (John 15:15)
Dear People of God, every week, here at Mass in the house of the Lord, we open our human minds and hearts to the Saviour Who, in the name of His heavenly Father, loves us beyond measure, that we might be enlightened by His teaching, inflamed with His very presence, and endowed and empowered by the abiding Gift of His Most Holy Spirit.
