Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
“You are the salt of the earth …. You are the light of the world.”
“Let there be light.”
The first words God ever spoke.
Since the earliest of times, every major religion has featured a language of light.
Jewish people use the menorah to celebrate the Hanukah miracle of faith triumphing over evil. The Quakers have a famous expression: “I’ll hold you in the light,” instead of our more common promise: “I’ll pray for you.” Our baptismal celebration features the lighting of a candle along with the spoken hope that you will “walk always as a child of the light.”
Light illuminates. It warms. It destroys darkness. It lifts spirits.
What the prophet Isaiah makes crystal clear in our first reading is that we are to become a people of light. As he challenges us so powerfully with his inspirational words, our actions of “clothing the naked” are to be so far-reaching, out deeds of “bestowing bread on the hungry”“ are to be so radical, our cries of anguish over the need for “sheltering the oppressed and the homeless” so loud, that they will break forth through the darkness of greed and the idolization of fame and power that engulf us like a shroud of gloom and despair.
Many people speak these days of our culture of depression and anxiety, of hate and fear. As Fr. Richard Rohr suggests, “Maybe that is why our earth is so depleted and our politics are so pathetic.”
We seemingly have come to embrace darkness rather than the immeasurable gift of light – the darkness of hate, of pornography, of drugs, of violence, of cynicism, of cruelty, of the horror of human trafficking, the caging of human beings, of abortion.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus challenges us to embrace instead the ultimate antidote to all this darkness. He calls us t4o create lives of generosity and gratitude. He shines a beacon of hope in the midst of all this negativity that surrounds us and tell us instead:
“Your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.”
In our second reading today, the apostle Paul reminds us in very graphic terms that “You were once darkness, but now you are the light in the Lord. Live as children of the light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth.”
Jesus then challenges us further. We are also to become salt – the “salt of the earth.”
It’s difficult for us today to understand how critically essential salt was to the ancient world. The great early civilizations first developed near deserts close not only to water, but to salt resources. The ability that salt provided to preserve food was a requirement for people at that time.
And, beyond this, salt offered another very important gift: it gave flavor to food. That’s what Jesus wants to emphasize. We are to become people who bring a whole new taste tot the world we live in. We are to “God flavor” it.
Light and salt – two strongly connected commodities.
From Jesus’ point of view, the more we create a “God flavor” to life, the more we become light and the more we can dispel the darkness we find surrounding us.
That new taste, that new “God flavor” then becomes contagious. It spreads. It multiplies.
“Let there be light.”
When you and I were baptized, a candle was lit, and the priest prayed over us with these words:
“This light is entrusted to you to be kept burning brightly …. May you walk always as a child of the light.”
God has passed the light of the heavens on to you and to me. Let each of us hold our lives “in the light” and illumine the world we live in by flavoring it with the taste of God.
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
