“You are the salt of the earth,” says Jesus, “and if salt loses it’s saltiness, by what can it be made salty?” Have you ever noticed that Jesus has a habit of asking pesky questions? This question, more obviously rhetorical it would seem, invites the hearer to wonder about what can restore the quality that is the thing itself.
It’s a powerful question. And the power lies in Jesus’s first naming that “you are salt.”
Consider this with a slightly awkward variation: ‘Only you can become your true (salty) self; who will be you if not your (salty) self?’
In other words, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who will be you if not you?” Only you can be God’s flavorful, illuminating gift to the world that you are. No one else can be the flavor that you are. No one else can be the brightness that you are.
This is not to be confused for Jesus’s claim that, “He who saves his life will lose it; he who loses his life will save it.” Being who we are made to be is not the same thing as attempting to save our life. This is not about making a name for yourself or accumulating power and wealth. Being who we are made to be, with the full flavor of our inner aliveness, is how we lose our life for this deep and abiding truth of our personhood, hidden with Christ in God. Jesus amplifies, here, the particular flavor and brightness of each person who is invited to become their fully alive, salty self.
But what does it mean to be our fully alive self?
For starters, if no one else can be who you are made to be, it is best that each of us refrain from vain attempts to “live up to” or try to be who people “expect us to be.” While another person can be a catalyst for us to become our fully alive selves, no one can tell me who this is. Only I can discover who I am to be, and only I can live this into reality. It also means I need to stop expecting other people to be who I want them to be, so that I can, instead, draw out from them the truth of who God is making them to be.
We live in a world where everything and everyone, it seems, is trying to tell us who to be, telling us how to think or feel about most everything. With so many devices, products, and corporations vying for our attention, we are often too distracted even to know who or what we are becoming. We barely know what we’re doing, much less who we are.
How can I be salt if everything around me is sucking the flavor out of my life? How can I be me if I never stop to discover who I am? In short, how can I be me—the me that I was created to be—if I’m still holding on to the self that a consumer, competitive culture wants me to be? When I lose that self—when I stop trying to saving my life through the worldly means of climbing the socio-economic ladder, I will finally discover the inner aliveness of God that’s been there all along. As we read in the Gospel of Thomas, “Whoever has self-knowledge, the world cannot contain them.”
To let go of this false self and inhabit the truth of our aliveness in the Spirit—to no longer be contained by the world, begins by simply noticing, with gratitude, the small and beautiful gifts all around. Gratitude has a way of shifting our attention to see just how magical life really is, even when we find ourselves in a challenging season.
Pausing to notice the gifts before us incline to gratefulness. Gratefulness inclines to an open heart. Open hearts open hearts, and bring about transformation in the world, for open hearts do not lose their flavor—their saltiness. Open hearts season the world with aliveness.
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