Your Mission: Blandness, Lowliness, and Darkness
Today’s gospel is kind of a pep-talk from Jesus to his disciples (as well as a cautionary tale for those who waste this potential). He uses three metaphors to get his point across, comparing his disciples to salt, a city on a hill and a light. He doesn’t insist that they will become salt, city and a light, but that they are and must allow the world to see them so that the world “…may glorify the heavenly Father.”
One aspect these images all share in common is that by themselves they are useless. Have you ever had a teaspoon of salt, or stared into a source of light only to be blinded when turning away, or heard of a thriving city cut off from commerce from other cities? All of these metaphors suggest use in the context of need. Salt is used to season bland food, light to provide a way in the darkness and the visibility of a great city on a hill to attract people to its location.
The nature of the gift always suggests the mission. Salt brings life and sustains the freshness of food that otherwise would be bland and soon rotten. Our mission is to the bland. The routine of daily life where often people simply “go through the motions” is a dead-end ritual that often lacks meaning. “Working for the weekend” suggests the only proper end of work is recreation rather than the value of work itself. Being the “salt”, Christians can bring tastiness, the hope of meaning, in living lives that celebrate all aspects of life itself. Animated by the Spirit, we have the power to live such a daily life others find meaningless, create community and flavor to the bland fare of modern work. We don’t have to be celebrated to find meaning; we can live a life of gratitude and allow our care and mindfulness to shape our work into something sacramental.
Our mission is to darkness. There are places where fear imprisons its residents, but where people who are light chart a pathway out of the darkness. Father Gregory Boyle in Los Angeles is a good example of one who has brought out the many lights hidden in youth gang violence by allowing his single light to illuminate hope and promise in a part of the city where hope and promise are too often well out of sight. Today’s saint, St. Jerome Emiliani, in the darkness of a military prison found the light of Christ while captive, learned to pray and eventually lighted the way for thousands of orphans, the sick and the poor in establishing the Clerks Regular of Somasca. Our Christian heritage is rich with such lights, and the darkness is a time-honored mission.
Our mission is to the hidden, the outcast and forgotten by entering into obscurity fearlessly to allow people to find dignity, love, and purpose in a world that tells them they are worthless is also a great calling. The Alcoholics Anonymous parable of a man in a well will serve us here. There was a man trapped in a well with no hope of getting out. One man passes overhead and hears the cry for help, looks at the depth of the well and says he will go for help as soon as he can find someone with a long enough ladder to reach the bottom. A religious guy writes a prayer and drops it down. Finally, a third man approaches and jumps down into the well. The man in the well asks incredulously “Why in the world did you do that. Now we are both stuck!” The man who jumped down replies “Yes. But I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”
Our own darkness, blandness and hidden wounds are, through Christ, light, meaning, and purpose for the world, because God bestowed these gifts to us through the Holy Spirit, as the famous hymn declares “When we first believed.” Such amazing grace is only realized though when it is accompanied by the fearless response of our calling to the bland, lowly and dark places in our world.
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