“Metaphor is the first love of English teachers, poets and advertising creatives, and it’s used skillfully by pretty much anyone who enjoys talking. When people describe a bad toupee as a rug, or when they call a troubled celebrity a train wreck, they are speaking in metaphor. Equating your subject with something apparently unrelated helps guide your audience to a deeper and more specific understanding of that subject. People will grasp the wretchedness of a toupee much more quickly if you call it a rug than they will if you just describe it as unattractive.”
Suzanne Pope

It’s perhaps the most famous sermon in the world.  Jesus himself goes up on a mountain, sits down, and the people begin to gather around with eager ears and hungry hearts.  The theme of the sermon seems to be “Life in the Kingdom of God: What It Means to Follow Christ.”

And in this sermon — which can be found in Matthew 5, 6, & 7 — Jesus talks about our bodies, our clothing, our money, our sexuality, our marriages, how we use words, how we pray, how we eat, how we relate to God’s law, how we handle strained relationships, how we regard our enemies, how we treat our worries, how we pursue various spiritual disciplines, how we relate to his claims to ultimate authority, etc.

But early on in this sermon, the Lord demonstrates that in addition everything else, he’s also the Master of the Metaphor.  He uses two of them, and we’ve been trying to unpack the meaning of them ever since.

The first was this.  Speaking to his disciples, he said: “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” (Matthew 5.13)

Now, remember what Ms. Pope says above:  “Equating your subject with something apparently unrelated helps guide your audience to a deeper and more specific understanding of that subject.” This metaphor is intended to guide us to a deeper and more specific understanding of what it means to be a follower of Christ. 

So.  We’re salt. 

What do you make of that? 

Here’s the deal:  Salt had many domestic uses that would spring to the minds of Jesus’ contemporaries.  It was used as a condiment, to add seasoning, flavor, and relish to what would otherwise be bland and tasteless food.  Check out the comment on salt in Job 6.6, for example. 

But in the millennia before refrigeration was invented, salt was primarily used as a preservative.  It was salt that kept meat wholesome; it was salt that prevented next week’s dinner from decaying today.  And in some places of the world, it still is.  As you read these words, there are people in this world rubbing coarse salt into dried meat so they can live off of it later.  Otherwise the meat would putrefy and rot.  It cannot keep itself from going bad.

And so with this fallen, broken world.  It cannot keep itself from going bad.  The process of moral and social decay can only be arrested — or at least hindered — by the influence of something like salt from the outside of it.

God has established a variety of institutions to restrain this world from utter decay: the state keeps us from slipping into anarchy; the family hinders our tendencies toward selfish abandon.  These are meant to be wholesome, God–ordained influences in society.  But the most powerful restraint that God has applied to the decay of this sin–sick world is his church.

Read today’s headlines.  Human moral standards are made of pitiful, constantly changing, and altogether unreliable stuff.  It’s the kind of stuff that won’t “keep” over time.  It needs salt.  It needs the church. 

But note what Jesus says about this salt in the rest of verse 13.  The effectiveness of salt is conditional.  It must retain its “saltiness,” or it will be of no help whatsoever.

To remain effective, Christians must retain their “saltiness.” So, “have salt in yourselves,” Jesus said to his followers on an occasion when he was returning to this lesson (Mark 9.50). 

How do we retain our saltiness, our effectiveness in this world?  By remaining faithful to Christ. 

Salt itself is a very stable chemical compound and very resistant to attack.  But if it becomes contaminated with impurities, it becomes useless.  So with the Christian.  When we become contaminated with the impurity of a world in rebellion against Christ, we lose our influence in this world. 

Christians who are indistinguishable from the rest of the world are like saltless salt.  And Jesus said (Matthew 5.13) that saltless salt wasn’t good for much.

Dr. Martin Lloyd–Jones says this:  “The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it.  It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first.”

Next time we return to the Life category, we’ll pick up the next metaphor Jesus used near the headwaters of the Sermon on the Mount.  This world is not only decaying; it’s also dark.