We’re intended to spread throughout the world and enhance it, adding flavor to things that would be bland, drawing out the blessings of whatever is good, and providing a contrast by being distinct and different. 

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. (Matt. 5:13)

Few things in creation are more ordinary than salt.

Most of us have interacted with it in the last couple of hours, whether we realize it or not. We use it to make leather, pottery, soap, detergents, rubber, clothes, paper, cleaning products, glass, plastics, and pharmaceuticals. It sits largely unnoticed on hundreds of millions of café and restaurant tables around the world.

Unlike pepper, which is often sitting next to it, salt is essential for our health and has always been eaten by human beings wherever we have settled. We add it to so much of our food that many languages simply distinguish between sweet and salty flavors. We spread it across roads when it snows. More than half of the chemical products we make involve salt at some stage. And that’s without mentioning the trillions of tons of it that sit in our oceans, covering 70 percent of the surface of our planet.

Salt is everywhere.

Jesus’s Illustration

Its ordinariness and its use in all cultures make it an obvious candidate for Jesus to use as an illustration. Jesus, as we know, loved using everyday items to communicate truths about God and his people, and his description of the disciples as “the salt of the earth” (Matt. 5:13) is arguably the best-known example. To this day, people use the phrase to describe good, honest, humble people. Less predictably, it also features as the name of a Rolling Stones song, a D. H. Lawrence poem, and an intriguing variety of products including deodorants, water softeners, and (bafflingly) wine.

Here is the really odd thing, though: an awful lot of Jesus’s disciples, the very people whom he identified as the salt of the earth, are still not entirely clear on what he meant. Lots of us have heard explanations of it—our job is to make the world taste better or stop it from rotting—but these explanations often conflict with each other and suffer from various problems. Jesus was talking about salt in relation to the earth, not food. Salting the earth was something people did after destroying their enemies, rather than blessing them. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus connects salt with fire and with living at peace together (Mark 9:49–50), neither of which seems to fit with the idea of tastiness or preservation. Technically, sodium chloride doesn’t lose its flavor anyway. So what on earth is Jesus talking about?

The reason it’s confusing is that salt had a number of purposes in the ancient world. At least five of them are relevant to Jesus’s words about his disciples: salt was used for flavoring, preserving, sacrificing, destroying, and fertilizing. Rather than assuming that Jesus’s statement is confusing and then debating which particular use of salt he had in mind, it’s best to assume he knew what he was doing and that metaphors can function in multiple ways. Followers of Jesus are like salt: although we’re ordinary and everywhere and get involved in pretty much everything whether we’re noticed or not, we also have a variety of roles to play as God’s kingdom comes on earth.

Let’s consider each of those five purposes.

1. Flavoring

Salt makes food taste better, either by adding flavor to something that would otherwise be bland (chips or fries), by enhancing flavors that are already there (vegetables), or by providing a contrast with a very different sort of taste (mmm, salted caramel). This is probably the use of salt that most of us think of, because it’s the only one of the five that still applies today.

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