That’s today’s Gospel, so of course, it prompts reflection.
In communion with Jesus, we’re sent into the world, and we’re living and moving in that world to preserve what’s good and to let him shine through us to conquer darkness.
It’s a call to love as he loves: sacrificially and freely, unreservedly.
Living in this world, though, is complicated. It’s messy and layered and we live in it, not as atomized beings with the ability to float above it all and see with God’s eyes – but, as we are, which means: limited.
Limited by our humanity, by our vision which can only see so far, our hearing which can only pick out a few notes from the symphony coursing around us, limited by the culture in which we live, and most of all limited by sin – our own sin and the sin of the world.
So our understanding of what it means for us to be “salt” and “light” – so simply articulated by Jesus in the Gospel – must be subject to constant discernment.
For the call to boldly bring the Good News into the world that so badly needs it can be immediately distorted by all of those limitations, can’t it?
We can hear it, not as a call to humble, sacrificial, self-denying love, but instead as an invitation – in this present cultural and social moment – to:
- Confuse the presence of Christ within us with ourselves and our own person and personality.
- Act as though the world needs us rather than Christ
- In the name of “putting ourselves out there” – specifically on social media in the name of of “evangelization” – nurture vanity – about our appearance, our marriage, our family life, our lifestyle, our accomplishments, even our supposed “quirks.”
- Profit financially or via other forms of currency – from the “salt” and “light” we purport to bring into the world.
- Focus our sights on being “salt” and “light” – out there in the world, while ignoring our own duties to family and local community.
- Feed my ego, rather than the world’s hungry souls.
Essentially: conflating the loving presence that Jesus calls for with personal achievement, vainglorious goals and humblebragging.
It’s a tricky line to walk, as I’ve written before, countless times. We do have unique gifts that we’re called to use. It’s the purpose of those gifts – to turn over to the Lord’s will. But the temptation to put ourselves – without discerning our own temptations – at the center, rather than Christ, is a temptation as old as James and John’s request to sit at Jesus’ right hand right after he’d predicted his Passion.
Yep.