Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

I find Jesus and Isaiah challenging.  Both are strong, blunt, uncompromising.  Jesus tells me what I should be; Isaiah tells me what I should do.

First, a bit of Jewish history.  Salt and light would have caught the Israelite’s attention like a Super Bowl commercial.  Salt was indispensable for human living.  Salt changed what it touched, kept it from spoiling, rotting, corrupting.  Salt even purified.  And what can I say of light?  In the one-room cottage of the Hebrew peasant, the small dish-like devices in which oil was burned were essential.  Without it life would have been dark indeed.  So much of life would have stopped at dusk.

A nice footnote to ancient history.  But Jesus is not playing historian.  He is making an astounding affirmation – directly to his first followers and indirectly to all of us: “You are the salt of the earth.  You are the light of the world.”  Jesus is insisting that this world depends on the Christian disciple.  Not simply apostles like Andrew and Peter, fervent followers like Mary of Nazareth and Mary of Magdala.  Not just Francis of Assisi and Francis Xavier; not just Therese of Lisieux, Mother Teresa of Calcutta.  For genuine human existence, if we are ever to move from war to peace, from hating to loving, this earth of ours rests on your shoulders and mine.

Not on our shoulders alone.  Not simply on Christians.  Believers and unbelievers, all who are alive, are involved.  And still, you and I have a clear call from Christ.  Not a gentle suggestion.  A loud trumpet sound.  Our task, like salt, is to improve the quality of human living, change what we touch.  If we disciples turn flat, lifeless, tasteless, some of our sisters and brothers will suffer, spoil, corrupt – will starve for bread or justice or love.  Listen to the harsh judgment of Jesus: you will be worthless, useless, fit for the garbage dump, deserve to be thrown into the street with the rest of the rubbish.

And you are the light of the world.  Jesus is insisting that we who believe, we who have risen with him and live in his presence, we who eat his body and drink his blood, have no right to hide our gifts.  The gifts we have should stand out, shine like bright lights, should make people pause, force them to stop and look and listen.  Our faith should lend fidelity to the faithless, our hope raise the hopeless, our love assuage the cancer of hate.

All of this is so terribly vague.  How do we get salt out of the cellar?  How shine our light so that women and men can be dazzled by the light of Christ?  Isaiah 58 thunders one way.  Jesus summed up his own mission in the Nazareth synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.   God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”

I cannot tell any single one of you precisely what you should do or precisely how.  That’s between you and Jesus and listening carefully to the mission of Christ Our Hope Church.  I assure you, you thrill me, you humble me with the good works you do.  I dare make a couple of suggestions as your pastor and a fresh examination of my own conscience. 

First, despite all we actually do at Christ Our Hope, many of us can do more.  The Pope tells young people: “Think big!  Open your hearts!”  Unless we do more, our Christianity will be tasteless.  Second, while lighting the world – the Women’s Wellness Center, the Pike Market Foundation, the mission trip to Nicaragua, Resident Services – look more closely, more lovingly, into the eyes we meet each day.  Oppression is not confined to Second and Stewart.  The oppressed rub shoulders with us everywhere.

Our own flesh and spirit are burdened with yokes at times barely bearable.  For, as the Christ of Calvary reveals, the most effective servant is the suffering servant, the servant whose experience makes for com-passion, the servant who “suffers with.”  It is especially “then” that “you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and God will say, ‘Here I am.’”

Rev. Paul A. Magnano

Pastor