Salt and a City of Light

Jesus had just told the crowd on the hillside that following him would not make life easy. "People will insult you because of me," he said. "They will hurt you and tell lies about you, the way they did to the prophets long ago. Be glad anyway. Your reward in heaven is great."

The fishermen in the crowd looked at one another. Then Jesus told them what they were.

"You are the salt of the earth."

A fisherman near the front scratched his beard. "Salt?" (He had a big clay jar of it at home. Every fisherman did.) There were no fridges in those days, so people packed fish in salt to keep it from going bad, and they stirred it into bread and stew so the food tasted of something.

"But if salt stops being salty," Jesus said, "how can it be made salty again? It is good for nothing. People throw it out on the road and walk all over it."

(Salt back then often came out of the ground mixed with sand and dirt. If the rain washed the real salt away, what was left still looked like salt and tasted like dust.)

Then Jesus pointed across the valley. On top of a far hill sat a town, its walls bright in the late sun.

"You are the light of the world," he said. "A town built on a hill cannot be hidden."

Everyone knew it was true. When night came, every window up there would glow, and travelers miles away could find the road by it.

"And when people light a lamp," Jesus went on, "they don't put it under a bowl. They set it up on a stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house."

A clay lamp in those days was about the size of a child's hand: a puddle of olive oil, a wick, one flame. Set high on a shelf, it lit the whole one-room house. Put a bowl over it, and the flame would choke and go out, and the family would spend the evening bumping into the furniture and stepping on the cat.

"In the same way," Jesus said, "let your light shine in front of everyone, so they will see the good things you do and praise your Father in heaven."

The praise would go to the Father, not to the lamp.

Flat salt cannot make itself salty again, and no lamp can light itself. Another time, Jesus said it the other way round. "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in the dark." The crowd's light would be lit from his.

Jesus died on the cross, and on the third day he rose. Before he went back to heaven, he told his friends to carry the news about him through Jerusalem, and Samaria, and all the way to the ends of the earth.

So they went. One lamp lit the next, from house to house and town to town, the way windows light up one by one across the hills at dusk.

There are more of those windows now than anyone could count, and every one of them was lit from his.