Tuesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
It’s amazing what salt and light can do. If my food is bland, sprinkling salt makes that dish taste better. If I am walking in the dark, turning on a light helps me see and not stumble on things. In today’s Gospel, Jesus told his disciples that they are “the salt of the earth” and “light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-14). What does that mean for us today?
We are not literally salt and light. Jesus used those metaphors in order to teach about discipleship. As disciples, we learn from Jesus. We participate in his mission of bringing the Reign of God into this world by imitating him in his actions and virtues. By doing so, we become more like Jesus. Christ dwells in us. Thus, he flavors and illuminates our lives and the people we encounter everyday.
In living as disciples, we are witnesses to Jesus and the Kingdom of God and examples of living with God’s presence. For example, to the participants in the Seminar of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life, Pope Leo XIV spoke about how married couples are an example to others:
Perhaps many young people today who choose cohabitation instead of Christian marriage in reality need someone to show them in a concrete and clear way, especially by the example of their lives, what the gift of sacramental grace is and what strength derives from it. Someone to help them understand “the beauty and grandeur of the vocation to love and the service of life that God gives to married couples” (St. John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio,1).
We are also called to set up places where God’s presence is felt. To illustrate, in that same message, Pope Leo XIV pointed out:
Similarly, many parents in raising their children in the faith, feel the need for communities that can support them in creating the right conditions for their children to encounter Jesus, “places where the communion of love, which finds its ultimate source in God, takes place,” (Francis, General Audience, 9 September 2015).
We are challenged to let God’s light shine through us, not put it under a basket nor to not let the salt of God go insipid. We are called to live a faith that extends God’s love to others, not make God a burden to them. I think Pope Leo XIV said it best in the message I referenced earlier:
Faith is primarily a response to God’s love, and the greatest mistake we can make as Christians is, in the words of Saint Augustine, “to claim that Christ’s grace consists in his example and not in the gift of his person” (Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum, II, 146). How often, even in the not too distant past, have we forgotten this truth and presented Christian life mostly as a set of rules to be kept, replacing the marvelous experience of encountering Jesus—God who gives himself to us—with a moralistic, burdensome and unappealing religion that, in some ways, is impossible to live in concrete daily life.
May God’s presence in your life empower you to be salt and light for the world.
—Sr. Emily Sandoval, FMI