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“You are the salt of the earth ... You are the light of the world,” we are told today. This Gospel text follows immediately after the Beatitudes, which we heard last Sunday. Jesus taught us how to be like him when he taught us the Beatitudes; they have to do with an interior transformation wrought in us. What he says to us today, then, has to do with the outward effect that interior transformation will have on society. Jesus describes what we will be for the world around us if we live the Beatitudes.

In other words, salt and light exist for others, not for themselves.  Salt is for food; light is to help people see.

Salt seasons food and elevates its flavor. It can make a bland dish palatable — tasty, even. Just so, Christians living the Beatitudes in the world can elevate every human activity and transform it to serve a higher purpose. And there is another important thing salt does. It preserves. Thus, those who live the Beatitudes will keep the world from falling into corruption and decay. And it only takes a pinch of salt — say, one person in a community, one parish in a county.

Light allows people to see. It keeps them from stumbling in the dark, injuring themselves, wandering down paths that lead to destruction. The Christian living the Beatitudes in the world is a light to others. One bright lamp can light the whole room.

We may look around our world today and lament how society is becoming ever more secular, or even explicitly pagan. It is forgetting its Christian roots or even actively seeking to cut itself off from those roots. It is a culture that needs more salt and light.

You could compare our times to the first few centuries A.D. When the apostles first went out to proclaim the Gospel to the ends of the earth, it was new and foreign. As Christians grew in number, they could not escape notice of others. The pagans heard rumors about this strange new religion: something about eating a man’s flesh, for example. How could this strange religion possibly be good for society? The pagans felt threatened by the presence of such people in their midst.

Some early Christians took it upon themselves to explain and defend the faith. These apologists wanted to show how the presence of Christians in society was actually advantageous, not harmful — to show that the presence of Christians is salt and light for the world.

One example is a second-century letter from an anonymous Christian to a very influential pagan named Diognetus. This letter explained that in some sense, Christians are indistinguishable from anyone else. They could belong to any nationality, speak any language, and hold practically any occupation. But on the other hand, they do stand out in certain ways. They refuse to engage in certain immoral practices: “Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.” And curiously, they live in this world as if they were only passing through.

The letter continues, “They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then, they rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.”

They are poor and persecuted, and yet Christians enrich others and love them. What the author of the letter to Diognetus is describing is how Christians living the Beatitudes are salt and light to the world. He is not describing an ideal that those Christians were imagining being able to live. It is what they were in fact living. We are called to live the same way.