It’s difficult to imagine salt that hasn’t got any saltness. It would be only appearances, with no taste behind the appearance. Christ is trying to focus our minds on essentials. This passage links up with the parable of the Sower, where some seed fell on rocky ground … it did not have much depth of soil and … since it had no root, it withered away. We are to reject things that promise much but don’t deliver. Like dodgy eyes or flavourless salt. Jesus is saying, “look at your way of living. Are you living on the surface, not going down to the roots? It easily happens –it happens all the time. In worship, for instance. Thinking about the music, concern with the way it is going, what other people are doing, as you might do at a concert or the cinema – all of it important – but forgetting the most important thing, the divine presence.
I’ve just come back from a camping holiday, and frequently when I was saying the offices I looked up at the huge immensity of the sky – I needed to be reminded ever and again of the colossal mystery of the God I was addressing. It could easily be a human-centred getting a job done, helped along with a bit of spiritual concentration. A lot of worship in the Church today is more centred on the humna beings than perhaps we realize. That’s missing the heart of the matter. It’s easy for a parish, a college, a religious community, church administration, diocesan machinery, and so on, simply to have the mentality of running a ship. To forget God’s sovereign call, the momentous presence in our midst. It’s the same with our life with others, and the care we need to have for one another. We often find we have to force ourselves, whether it’s in loving our neighbour or saying our prayers. To make an effort, because we would prefer it easier.
The one time in which I have visited New York, I caught a bus and was faced with a very big lady bus driver. I put down something like a $10 bill, and she said “you’ve got to give the exact money – I don’t give change”. I said pathetically, “I don’t have any change”. She said, “go down the bus and ask somebody to change it for you”. I said, “I’m too shy”. She said “Aw, don’t be shy – go down there and do it”. The passengers on the bus had been taking a great interest in this exchange, and were eager to help, and so the problem got solved. But I had to be pushed, against my inclinations. It’s like that with something like daily prayer. Some days we might say, “I haven’t got the time – there’s too much to do this morning” – or, “I’m just not in the mood” – or we find some perfect excuse. Then we have to push ourselves. We need a big New York bus driver inside us, but importantly we also need the other people on the bus – without them I would have been faced just with the bus driver. Just as I needed those people, so we as Christians need to remain conscious of the Church and all the Christians with whom we are bound together.
My brethren will forgive me for telling a story they have heard before. Our Community has a longstanding and wonderful relationship with the Abbey of St Matthias in Germany. At one point they built a new guest house, and when I stayed in it for the first time my room was huge – it needed several paces to cross it, and all it had in it was a bed and a desk. I said to the Abbot, “why are your new guest rooms so big? You could have made them a lot smaller, like the rooms at Mirfield, and enabled more people to stay.” He looked at me with a smile, and said, “we have standards”. ‘Standards’ is a good word to keep in mind. One of the aims of the College of the Resurrection is that the priests who are trained here will have standards. For instance, faithfulness in daily prayer is about standards. You just do it. And when you don’t feel like it, then you push yourself. It needs to be there in all parts of our life. We had a striking example this week in relation to standards, in two families in the news. Both of them had children who had been involved in the recent riots. When one young lad went to court, his mother went on holiday, while the other family had marched their son to the police station as soon has they had heard what he had been doing. We can’t sit in judgment on other people without knowing the full circumstances, but the contrast between these two stories was striking. For Christians, we are faced with the issue of standards when we try to judge how the surface of our life connects with the immeasurable foundation on which it stands. In worship. and in our life of prayer, it’s about sustaining our awareness of whose presence we are in. People with standards, in any field in life, will remain standing when many around them lose their way or collapse.
However, we’ve got to be careful. Anybody with any sense will be able to see that if we are living according to standards, we will know our standards are better than the ways other people are living. St Paul tells us not to kid ourselves – we are fools, and we are worthless. Our glory is in our weakness, and any good that there may be in our lives is purely due to God’s free grace. It is God at work, and all we have done is what we ought to have done. If we manage to keep our eyes trained on the essential, on the stupendous presence of God in all of our life, that doesn’t stop us being weak and foolish, and gives us no cause for boasting. It is God’s grace, who saves us from falling on rocky ground, and coaxes us to pierce down to the roots. It is God making us salty, God creating eyes and hands and feet that don’t cause us to stumble. We can’t lay claim to anything – our part, rather, is to see. And seeing, to be laid hold of, in a very corporate way, by a reality, a commanding and loving presence, bigger than us.