‘The secret ingredient your sermon is missing.’ The title of the post I received was sufficiently intriguing to require urgent
examination. If only there were just one missing ingredient was my first
thought. And then came the answer: ‘Preachers
cannot be content to glide along the surface of the biblical ocean, telling
their hearers of the great treasures that lie under the boat. Instead, they are
to dive down into the depths of the water, see it themselves, marvel, and then
come up and exclaim, with seaweed on their shoulders, as one who has themselves
seen: “This is who God is!” “This is what Christ has done for your souls!”… Effective preachers are those who have been
personally moved by the text before they attempt to see others moved by the
text.’
This is great, I thought,
let’s try to apply it to an ingredient that is in today’s gospel: salt. And
then I came unstuck. How can I be moved by the text ‘everyone will be salted with fire’ when I don’t
understand it? It so happens that Mark 9:49 is renowned as a difficult
text, so my difficulty is not unique. One of the reasons on that we compare biblical translations is that sometimes the
comparison provides a clue to different understandings of the text where there
are difficulties. The King James Bible has ‘every one shall be
salted with fire, and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt’, while the New
King James Bible has a slight difference: ‘everyone will be seasoned with fire,
and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt’. The Good News Bible has a
non-literal translation: ‘Everyone will be purified by fire as a sacrifice is
purified by salt.’
So we can deduce from some of the
different translations that there is an allusion here to the Hebrew sacrifices
in which meat was salted so as to extract the blood and thus ‘purify’ the
animal. The fire that is alluded to in this sense, therefore, is not hell fire
but the fire of the sacrificial altar. ‘Everyone will be purified by fire as a
sacrifice is purified by salt’, as the Good News Bible or Today’s English
Version has it.
It is an interpretation which makes
sense, but is it the meaning of the text? Can we be moved by the text ‘everyone
will be salted with fire’ if it is given this meaning? It is clear that in
Hebrew ‘being salted’ can mean to be destroyed utterly. There is an example in
Judges 9:45, where ‘Abimelech fought against the city [that
is, Shechem] all that day; he took the city, and killed the people that were in
it; and he razed the city and sowed it with salt.’ To be salted in this way is
to be destroyed without any capacity for regeneration; those who suffer this
fate perish or are lost completely.
In the preceding verses Mark records
Jesus’ warnings about offending ‘these little ones’ and Jesus’ suggestions that
we would be better off to rid ourselves of offending parts of our body than to
be cast into hell, where the fire never goes out and “their worm does not die”.
It fits this context to translate Mark 9:49 thus: ‘everyone [who is sent to
hell] will be completely destroyed (by fire).’ In other words, this verse has to be read as the conclusion of the previous
passage and not as the introduction to the last verse of chapter 9 of Mark’s
gospel.
Tom Wright translates verse 50 thus:
‘salt is great stuff; but if salt becomes unsalty, how can you make it salty
again? You need salt among yourselves. Live at peace with each other.’ How can
salt remain salt if it loses its saltiness? The most obvious way is through
dilution by water, and one translation says as much (though it does not convey
the idea beautifully): ‘if the salt becomes deprived of
its salt content.’ We know that elsewhere Jesus
depicts his followers – today’s Christians – as the salt of the earth (Matthew 5:13, a similar but not identical passage). For the salt of the earth to lose its
degree of saltiness, the Gospel would have to diluted in the life of the
believer. Perhaps the individual becomes a complacent Christian, or a person
who does not live out the Christian message.
Luke’s
gospel (Luke 14:34) has a similar passage to Mark, but neither Matthew nor Luke conclude in the way
that Mark does: ‘Have salt in [or
among] yourselves, and be at peace with one another.’ This is a great insight
of Jesus’ which is now rather lost because of concerns about excessive amounts
of salt in our diet. Almost all pre-modern communities had a concept of
‘sharing salt’ among themselves as a sign of community friendship or, in
Christian terminology, love. Sharing salt IS being peace with one another.
Today, as one charity has shown, the letters of the word Salt can spell out
something even more than being at peace with one another: Sharing Abundant Life Together, or helping those with
those with no or very low incomes. This is the role of Christians
as the salt of the earth. At its best, the loving Christian servant community
in Church becomes the helping Christian community serving the needs of those
outside the Church. In this way Salt is more than ‘good’; it is indeed ‘great
stuff’. In the words of the author of ‘The secret ingredient your sermon is
missing’: This is who God is! This is what Christ
has done for …our souls!
