Salt and Light: “Your light must shine before others.” Matthew 5:16

June 10: Tuesday of Week 10 of Ordinary Time, Year A-II:

A thought for those who want to reveal the risen Jesus in their lifestyle.

1Kings 17:7-16; Psalm 4:2-3, 4-5, 7-8; Matthew 5:13-16

Salt brings out the taste in food. Christ’s New Law gives a new “taste” to human behavior beyond our imagining. It gives guidelines for living on the level of God. The New Law shows what human nature is capable of when enhanced by grace, the “gift of sharing in the divine Life of God.”

If Christians just live good human lives, not doing anything bad, and being nice to everyone, that is not news. We don’t bring out or reveal anything in human nature that wasn’t already known. The salt has “lost its taste.” But when we visibly live a divine, a “superhuman” morality as “prophets,” we are Good News to the world.

Jesus is “the light of the world.” When “the Word became flesh and lived among us,” we “saw his glory,” the glory of the Father’s only Son. Now that glory shines in us, to whom he “gave power to become children of God.” Jesus says to us today, “You are the light of the world.” But only if we live visibly by his New Law.

“The [old] law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” That is the Good News. Christian “prophets” who reveal “grace and truth” in their lives are the ”salt of the earth” and “light of the world.” (See John 1:1-18; 8:12).

PRAY: “Lord, let your face shine in me.”

PRACTICE: Think and act on the level of God.