Salted with fire

A few weeks ago I was rushing around gathering the food and supplies I needed to go down to Big Sur for our annual parish campout, and I went to the grocery store in a big hurry and I bought some bread. The next day at the campground I made some sandwiches for lunch, but when I bit into the bread it just tasted wrong. I thought I knew what the problem was right away and a closer look at the label on the bread bag confirmed what I feared—it was salt-free bread. Without salt, bread just doesn’t taste right.

Now I hate to waste food, so I gritted my teeth and kept working my way through that loaf of bread, but within a couple of days it started to have this awful, chemical taste to it, and I had to compost the last few slices. What I was tasting was alcohol-- without salt in it to slow down the fermentation the bread quickly started to spoil.

This little misadventure of mine illustrates two important qualities of salt: first, it makes things taste good, and second, it is a preservative, it keeps food from spoiling. This would have been even better known to people of Jesus time than it is to us. In ancient times, of course, they didn’t have freezers or refrigerators or canning factories to preserve their food—so salt was something precious that you couldn’t live without.

There is a lot about today’s Gospel reading that is difficult to interpret, but I suggest that this story might help us understand what Jesus is saying about salt and salting, and blandness and flavor. That’s all well and good, you may say, but there are a lot of different metaphors mixed together in this passage—so what could Jesus mean when says that “everyone will be salted with fire?” That’s a good question, and nobody knows for sure what it means, but if salt is what seasons and preserves, then fire is what transforms and purifies.

It is important to remember that in this section of Mark’s gospel Jesus is trying to get his disciples to understand what kind of Messiah he is. No one doubts that the running conflict that Jesus has been having with the powers-that-be is going to intensify as he moves toward Jerusalem. In fact, it is becoming clear that this conflict is central to God’s purpose in anointing and sending him. But what is most radical and creative and saving about Jesus’ mission is not the conflict itself, but the means that he will use to win it— prophetic demonstration, self-denial, patient suffering, and death.

But every time Jesus tries to explain all this, his disciples come back with something that shows that they just don’t understand. In this week’s reading John reports that they had to stop someone from driving out demons in the name of Jesus because, as he says, “he wasn’t following us.” Like their argument from last week about which one of them is the greatest, this shows that the disciples still think that the mission of the Messiah is going to be another chapter in the tired old human story of ranking winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, instead of God’s definitive judgment on all of that.

“God’s judgment” is not a term that most people feel very comfortable with, but that’s because they imagine that it is like the kind of judgment that we human beings are inflicting on ourselves and one another all the time. And if God were the kind of judge that the disciples would like to be, deciding which one of us is the greatest, or who gets to do exorcisms in Jesus’ name and who doesn’t, there would be little to hope for in God’s justice. But what if God’s judgment has nothing to do with punishment, or establishing the pecking order, or settling scores? What if God’s judgment is the purifying fire of grace, the passionate love that does not ask whether we are worth saving, or whether we are qualified, but seeks only to remove the stumbling blocks we place in our way? What if God’s judgment is to give us life, reconcile us to one another, and bring us to the peace of knowing our complete dependence on a mercy that is infinite?.

If you are like me you wouldn’t mind having some justice like that for yourself, but God forbid that it should be handed out to everyone. There are a lot of people in the world that I like to tell myself are greedy, stupid, selfish, phony, or just not trying hard enough. It shouldn’t shock you to hear me say this—this is how we human beings think, and it doesn’t really matter if we call it “Original Sin” or “Sociobiology” or “Cultural Conditioning”—it is deep-seated, so much so that rooting it out is exceptionally difficult and painful for our egos to bear. Perhaps that is why Jesus likens it cutting off a foot, or tearing out an eye. To encounter a justice so impartial that it could allow itself to be falsely accused before it would accuse its accusers, to be spat on and abused rather than abuse its abusers, to be horribly murdered rather than murder its murderers, is to see all our impatient, self-righteous, petty judgments of others turned around on ourselves, a smoldering fire that is not quenched, a worm that never stops gnawing at our hearts.

To follow Jesus on the way of peace means to systematically acknowledge and continually repent of the false judgments that set us apart from and against the world. As I said, this can be painful—for years I clung to the idea that I was more intelligent and more virtuous than all those middle-class Americans with their wasteful petroleum-powered lifestyles and conspicuous consumption, but as I have grown in my desire to experience common ground with others in society, and especially to repair my relationships with my family of origin, and to get married and have a baby, I have had to compromise that sense of superiority slowly but surely out of existence. Along the way, of course, I got to see how thoroughly it was imbued with envy and resentment.

As we surrender bit by bit our claim to some special and singular favor from God, we become more able to feel wonder and gratitude at the things that we share with other people, and indeed with all the creations of God. We develop a deeper appreciation for the way that universal qualities come together in the unique combination that makes us the essential people that we are—not better, not worse, not more or less deserving of love and happiness—just different. That combination includes some elements we like and are proud of, and some we find it is always difficult to accept. And so we never stop hoping for the purifying fire of God’s loving judgment to work on us, to keep us soft and malleable, to help us be compassionate with others whose secret hurts and struggles we can never fully understand. This is what gives us our saltness. This is the “something essential” that pulls all the rest of the flavors of our existence together and makes us savory rather than bland. Throwing ourselves completely on the mercy of God’s perfect justice preserves us for greater and greater freedom from the consequences of our errors in judgment--and other people’s--even beyond the seeming indignity of death. Having this salt in ourselves is what enables us to forgo all the unquiet and unjust stalemates that are what so often pass for peace in this world, and to move toward the actual reality that Jesus died to bring about.