Grace to you and peace from God our father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen
The text for this meditation is written in the 9th Chapter of the Gospel according to St Mark: Verses 38 – 50:
John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” 39 But Jesus said, “Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. 40 For the one who is not against us is for us. 41 For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward.
42 “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. 43 And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.45 And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame than with two feet to be thrown into hell. 47 And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, 48 ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’49 For everyone will be salted with fire. 50 Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”
Indeed, our Gospel reading for today has a challenging message, and as humans who are prone to sin by nature, we contemplate with some trepidation the thought of physically dismembering ourselves to save ourselves from the unquenchable fire. Does Mark mean all this literally? ……..Quite often in reading this passage, verses 49 – 50 are overlooked, after all they are a little confusing. I would like to address them today.
“For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another”
Jesus has something important to tell us here, but in order to understand what he means, we need to rethink the way we look at salt. If you go to well stocked supermarket, as you find in the cities, you will probably find the salt in or near the spice aisle. Have you seen the price of some of those spices? Some are between $15 to $140 an ounce. Then a little further on is the Table Salt at $1.00 per KG. In Bible days, it wasn’t like that; salt was valuable.
Salt is good. It’s good for cash—so much so that soldiers in the Roman army were paid part of their wages in salt. The Latin word for salt is sal. That’s why we call our wages today a salary.
Salt isn’t just good for making food taste better; it’s good for preserving it. In pre-refrigeration days, it was critical for keeping food. Without salt to preserve food for the future, day-to-day survival was much more difficult.
Salt is good. It’s necessary for health. If you have too little salt, you can die of heart failure. As many of the old explorers who trekked through this hot, dry, harsh country discovered, to run out of salt was life threatening. It wasn’t just that they’d need to eat bland food. Without salt, their health was at risk.
Salt is good. It’s good for sacrifice. In the Old Testament, sacrifices were first salted before being offered. This included not just the sacrifices of meat, but also of grain and even of incense. This was to purify the sacrifice and make it acceptable.
When Jesus says, “Salt is good,” he’s appealing to all of these benefits of salt, but perhaps most of all he was appealing to the purifying qualities of salt. After Elijah left this earth in a Chariot of fire with horses that separated him from Elisha - Elisha took up the mantle of Elijah and returned across the Jordan from where he and Elijah had come. His first miracle took place at the city of Jericho.
(2 Ki 2:19–22) Now the men of the city said to Elisha, “Behold, the situation of this city is pleasant, as my lord sees, but the water is bad, and the land is unfruitful.” He said, “Bring me a new bowl, and put salt in it.” So they brought it to him. Then he went to the spring of water and threw salt in it and said, “Thus says the Lord, I have healed this water; from now on neither death nor miscarriage shall come from it.” So the water has been healed to this day, according to the word that Elisha spoke.
(v 49) Salt is purifying, as Jesus said: “Everyone will be salted with fire”. You see, salt is like a little crystal with fire in the middle. If you put it on your tongue, you can taste it burning. If you put it on a cut, you can feel it burning. Fire is purifying. It’s used to burn away impurities and to remove dross from metal. Fire sanitises and sterilises. The Israelites used fire to dedicate pagan polluted places to the Lord. When Jesus says that everyone will be salted with fire, he’s referring to trials, difficulties, and temptations which purify and refine us. Being salted is not pleasant, but Jesus desires to preserve us from the corruption of this age.
Salt is like that, and we are like salt; for in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, (Mt 5:13) “You are the salt of the earth”. This is what’s behind the next curious statement that Jesus speaks: (v 50) “If the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again?”.
This is difficult for us to understand because of what we have for salt today. Salt is sodium chloride—a very stable molecule. It’s not quick to divide in a chemical reaction. It doesn’t degrade over time. If you buy a container of salt and leave it in your cupboard for fifty years, when you finally take it out, it will still be salt. It may be one solid chunk, but it will not have become anything else. That’s because we have pure salt. In biblical times, they didn’t.
In those days, salt was harvested from the surface of salt marshes or pits where salt water had flowed from the Mediterranean or the Dead Sea. Mediterranean Sea salt had mineral impurities, plus other impurities from the rocks it was scraped off, and from the algae, sand, and sea life that flowed in with the seawater. Dead Sea salt is even worse. Most of the salts in the Dead Sea are not sodium chloride.
In his book ‘The Land and the Book, vol. 2’. William M. Thompson, tells a story of how salt can indeed lose its savour:
A merchant of Sidon, having farmed of the government the revenue from the importation of salt, brought over a great quantity from the marshes of Cyprus—enough, in fact, to supply the whole province for many years. This he had transferred to the mountains, to cheat the government out of some small percentage of duty. Sixty-five houses . . . were rented and filled with salt. Such houses have merely earthen floors, and the salt next to the ground was in a few years entirely spoiled. I saw large quantities of it literally thrown into the road to be trodden under foot of men and beasts. It was “good for nothing.”
That is how salt can lose its saltiness. Humidity, sun, heat, and constant contact with the earth leach away the easily dissolved sodium chloride, leaving behind the impurities. Bits of rock and sand, mineral crystals, dirt and debris remain to make it look like it might be salt, but it’s tasteless. It has lost the fire of the salt within.
Is this not exactly what St. Paul warns us of in 2 Timothy 3: 1 - 5?
“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power”.
The Holy Spirit is the fire of the salt for the Triune God’s people. What Paul describes is what happens when the fire of the Holy Spirit is driven out of us by our love of self and the rest of the nasty things Paul mentions. We become empty crystals, having the form of the godly salt of the earth, but denying the work, presence, and power of the Holy Spirit. The salt can be leached out by the humidity of a life not fed in the Word of God. We can become flavourless, void of saltiness, going through the motions, still salt in appearance, yet without faith. We can be hypocrites: actors who look like believers by outward action, but having no faith.
Even whole church bodies can become saltless by refusing to salt the world. St. Paul bids us, (Col 4:5–6)“Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person”. We lose our saltiness if we refuse to stand against evil. A church that says “all roads lead to God” is a church that has lost its savour. Salt must purify; it must preserve. Salt substitute is not salt.
(v 50) “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another”. That’s still Jesus’ word to us—even though we, or even though a whole church body, can lose its saltiness. Because, you see, Jesus wouldn’t talk about losing saltiness unless we have salt, unless he’d in fact given us salt. We are still the salt of the earth, Jesus says. And it’s true. We have been purified, salted with salt, just like those Old Testament sacrifices. Jesus was our salted sacrifice. He was the one who purified us. By his death on the cross, he accomplished what all those salted sacrifices of the Old Testament promised: forgiveness of all sins. Now by God’s Word and Sacraments, that forgiveness, that purity, is given to us. We are filled with the Holy Spirit. We have salt in ourselves.
When we then forgive one another, we bring a purification and peace that is from God. When, earlier in our text, the disciples asked Jesus about a nameless exorcist, a man casting out demons in Jesus’ name but who wouldn’t follow them, Jesus said, (vv 39–40) “Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. For the one who is not against us is for us”.
That nameless exorcist had salt in himself. He had faith in Christ, and he was acting as a believer in Christ, empowered by the fire of His salt. He was making peace and driving back the kingdom of darkness. In fact, he was doing better than Jesus’ own disciples. Earlier in this same chapter of Mark, a man brought his son to Jesus’ disciples to have them drive out a demon who was doing great harm. The disciples could not. Jesus chastised them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?” The disciples hadn’t recognised this man who was casting out demons in Jesus’ name as having the salt of Christ in himself, and so they thought they were in conflict with him when no conflict existed; they didn’t realise that by their shared faith in Christ, their shared saltiness, they were actually at peace with one another.
In our Epistle, James tells Christians how they can have peace with one another. He says, (James 5:16)“Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working”, in other words James encourages us to rekindle the fire of salt in each other using the power of prayer that in the words of Jesus as written in (John 16:33) “in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
Dear friends, because we live by sacred grace, it is an eternal fact that that salt has no power in itself. Our holiness, our forgiveness, our power come from Christ. The salt in us only has power because it is from Christ. The salt of his sweat in Gethsemane, the salty blood he shed for us, these are what has won our forgiveness, filled us with salt, and given us power to do battle against the powers of evil, to purify and cleanse, to flavour and preserve, and to forgive one another. The world leaches the salt from us, but Christ salts us with His Word and Spirit that we may have peace with one another. May Christ so live in you in peace. Amen
The love and peace of or Great Triune God that is beyond all human understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen
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