RECENTLY, I HAD the privilege of speaking at a memorial for a friend of mine. Though I didn’t use the phrase in my comments, I had always thought of him as a “salt of the earth” kind of guy. The saying may mean slightly different things to different people: honest, trustworthy, hardworking, and so on. But it’s always meant as a compliment, as if to say, “The world needs more people like that.”

The phrase goes back to Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon, as we’ve seen, begins with the Beatitudes, in which Jesus describes blessing in a way that teaches us something about the kingdom of heaven. Disciples of Jesus should humbly know their own weakness and the mercy of God, and because of this, seek to be part of God’s work of bringing peace to a broken world.

Obviously, when Jesus speaks of hungering and thirsting for righteousness and then being persecuted for it, he’s not describing a private spiritual experience. He’s describing a way of being in the world, a way of embodying the righteous character of God in relationship to others.

Yes, he reminds his disciples, sometimes living this way will get pushback. Even the prophets, who spoke authoritatively with the very words of God, were persecuted (and don’t forget, some of that persecution came from God’s own people). But having said that, Jesus then uses a metaphor to suggest that the world needs people who are committed to a life of pursuing God’s kingdom:

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. (Matt 5:13, NIV)

Then, as now, salt was a common item with many uses. Typically, we use it as a seasoning or to preserve food. Salt is also mentioned in Leviticus 2:13 as a requirement for grain offerings. The context suggests that this would make the offering more aesthetically pleasing to God. Indeed, that verse refers to “the salt of the covenant,” and other texts like Numbers 18:19 refer to a “covenant of salt” in a way that suggests salt should be included in all burnt offerings.

Was this to preserve the meat? To make it more savory? Or more generally, was it part of bringing your best to God? The ancients would not have taken salt for granted the way we do, as something cheap and readily available. In some cultures, salt was used as currency. It’s possible, then, that just as God’s people were instructed to bring spotless sacrifices, so too were they to honor God by bringing what they would offer to the most distinguished of guests — food that has been well and lovingly seasoned, even if it costs something to do so.

When company comes, you don’t serve low-sodium cheese. You don’t hold back on expensive seasonings. And similarly, you don’t bring anything less than your best to God.

GIVEN OUR HISTORICAL and cultural distance from Jesus’ context, it’s impossible to know precisely what Jesus meant by using salt as a metaphor. And of course, precision itself may not be the goal. Jesus told stories and painted word pictures that would get into people’s imaginations and do their work from the inside out. He spoke in parables that sometimes even his closest disciples didn’t understand — and only rarely, it seems, did he go back to explain himself.

Did Jesus mean that people who were the salt of the earth somehow brought savor to the world? The traditional King James Version suggests that, as does Eugene Peterson’s contemporary translation:

You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? (The Message)

Or did Jesus mean that the godliness of believers somehow played a preservative role, as in slowing the decay of human society? That too. In the end, we’re not forced to choose.

But then we have to deal with another question: how does salt lose its saltiness? And if that’s not puzzling enough, one can translate the Greek as saying that the salt has become “foolish” — it’s the root from which we get the English word “moron.”

It might help to recognize that salt in the ancient world wasn’t like the table salt we know today, which is highly refined. Think, for example, of sea salt. If you take clean sea water and evaporate the liquid, what’s left is not only sodium chloride, but trace quantities of other minerals. Similarly, Himalayan pink salt also contains other minerals and impurities because it’s mined from salt deposits in Pakistan. And lava salt is actually salt to which charcoal has been added.

Many people of Jesus’ day may have gotten their salt from the Dead Sea, whose waters are several times saltier than the ocean. But whatever the source, what people would have known as “salt” contained minerals and compounds other than just pure sodium chloride. Dissolve out the sodium chloride and what’s left? It may still look like salt, but it’s actually useless — that’s the sense of “foolish” here. Might as well just toss it out into the street, where it will be trampled into the ground.

So what is Jesus saying? At the most basic level, Jesus is stating the obvious: salt that isn’t salty is useless. But if believers themselves are supposed to be salt, it’s also a warning that from the standpoint of God’s will for the world, the lives of some believers may be useless.

THE UPSHOT OF all of this is that Christians are not merely called to a relationship with God, but a relationship to the world. In their devotion to God and the pursuit of his kingdom, they have a kingdom vocation. They are called to live exemplary lives of humility and compassion. They are to be agents of God’s shalom and wholeness. They are to be the salt of the earth.

Maybe that means, as Peterson suggests, that they bring out “the God-flavors” of the world, giving a sinful world a taste of godliness. Maybe it means that they help preserve the world, until the day that Jesus returns to bring the kingdom to its full completion. Maybe it means something else, as others have suggested over the centuries.

And maybe it’s all of the above.

But one thing seems certain: the world needs more people like that.