It’s really an incredible thing when Jesus says,
“You’re the salt of the Earth.
You’re the light of the world.”

It’s basically our Lord saying,
“Look, I’m not doing this all on my own.
I’m not here to redeem the world just by myself.
I’m going to use you.
You’re going to be My partners in helping heal
and redeem the world.”

And so the way we help bring goodness into the world,
and beauty and truth and whatnot,
is by being light and by being salt.

We see this on perfect display in Saint Paul.
Saint Paul is such an attractive evangelist.
People loved him.
People followed him; they listened to him.

And what he says in our reading to the Corinthians
is not because he’s eloquent,
or good-looking, or charismatic.
It’s because he’s real.

He’s a man with real salt in his heart,
a man who loves God,
and that love kind of comes forth through him.

So by being himself, by being real salt-of-the-Earth kind of guy,
Paul is attractive.
So that word “salt,” okay, salt is significant.

When Jesus is saying this,
I mean, we say this now today, “salt of the Earth,”
and it’s just sort of a saying of ours.

But for our Lord in ancient times,
you know, salt really had four significant purposes.
Salt was quite valuable.

So the first purpose of salt in the ancient world
was that it was a preservative.
We kind of use this the same way today.
You put salt on some meat; it can keep it over time.

I remember when I was in Italy,
I saw one time a farmer making prosciutto.
He took a bunch of ham and ground it up,
and then he poured, like, a bucket of salt into it.

And then you could see prosciutto hocks
just hanging in restaurants for years
because they’re preserved by the salt.

So when we’re salt, or the Church is the salt of the Earth,
we’re called to preserve.
Preserve goodness.
Preserve truth.
Preserve beauty.

That’s one of the functions that we have.

Okay, the second act of salt, or what salt does, is this:
if it’s a preservative in some cases,
it’s also destructive in other cases.

So too much salt can destroy.
You see this, for instance,
when the Romans defeated Carthage.
They salted the Earth so nothing could ever grow there again.

You salt a garden plot, and you’re not going to see
flowers in that garden anymore.

Okay, so salt—we are called at times to destroy some things.
Not life or anything like that,
but to destroy, maybe, sin within us,
or negative ways of thinking,
or unhealthy images.

So as a Church, we don’t just let everything go.
We are called to cut some things out as disciples.
That’s what salt does.

So it preserves.
It destroys.

Salt was also a commodity.
It was a unit of measurement.
The word salarium in Latin is where we get
our word “salary” from.

Okay, so sometimes salt was used as exchange.
So that saying, like, “a man is not worth his salt”
or “she’s worth her salt”—
that’s where it comes from.

Okay, so we’re also a standard of measurement,
if you will, as a Church, as people.
Hopefully people look to us and they’re like,
“Yeah, that’s what it means to be a Christian.
That’s what it means to be a good man or a good woman.”

We kind of—hopefully—set the bar.

And then finally, the fourth purpose of salt is this:
it brings flavor, right?
You put salt on something—
salt your popcorn or whatever it might be—
and that thing is going to taste better.

That’s why Father Scott has a salt lick in his office,
you know. He likes, you know,
that feeling of tasting something good.

So as Christians, as Catholics,
when we have the love of God in our hearts,
again, we bring something very flavorful into the world,
hopefully into one another’s lives.

And again, Saint Paul had that.
May we have it too.
Amen.