A free gift of grace 

Last Sunday’s Gospel ended with an invitation for someone in a less esteemed seat at a banquet to move up to a more honorable one. This was meant to encourage all disciples to seek humility as a means of later exaltation at the time of the resurrection. This Sunday’s Gospel reading presents a much more difficult challenge to anyone who wished to follow after Jesus. A disciple must hate “father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life” (Lk 14:26). How can anyone understand these unreasonable demands?

In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus lays out three conditions for discipleship. Each one seems harder to achieve than the previous one. Discipleship requires complete dedication. Any previous social ties are secondary to this new bond with Jesus. The Gospel speaks in the strongest possible language: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). Second, one must be able, ready and willing to embrace persecution for the faith when it arrives (Lk 14:27). Finally, as if the first two did not already require complete dedication, the last condition of discipleship in this passage is the capacity to renounce all of one’s possessions and follow after Jesus (Lk 14:33).

No discussion follows this passage explaining how these out-of-ordinary demands lead to discipleship. Instead, the passage that follows this Sunday’s Gospel reading is a parable called the “Simile of the Salt.” “Salt is good, but if salt itself loses its taste, with what can its flavor be restored? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out. Whoever has ears to hear ought to hear” (Lk 14:34-35). 

Although salt remains a common and necessary nutrient, modern peoples might not understand the full spiritual resonance of salt in the ancient world. Salt had such value that it could substitute for gold as a means of exchange (in fact, the English word “salary” comes from the Latin word for salt). One of salt’s uses was in worship. It represented a full lush offering that held nothing back. Jews and Romans sprinkled salt in their sacrificial offerings. Salt’s value made even a humble grain offering a precious and costly gift. In this way, salt symbolized a deep self-offering along with the gift on the altar. Salt thus could call to mind the precious nature of the covenant between Israel and God (see Lv 2:13; Ezk 43:24). Throughout the Gospels, Jesus draws on this ancient understanding when he uses salt as a simile for discipleship.

Last Sunday’s second reading from Hebrews reminded us that the former covenant, based on the Law of Moses, could not be fulfilled unless its obligations were practiced perfectly and without exception. The writer of Hebrews contrasts this with Jesus’ covenant which was fulfilled in the offering of his own blood, “which speaks more eloquently than that of Abel” (Heb 12:24). Jesus’ own perfect offering is the “salt” with which disciples make the gift of their own humble lives precious. No other attachment has that power. Family, friends, possessions, even one’s own ego bear no comparison to Christ’s self-offering. The most precious gift we can make to God is the “salt” of our faith in Christ to the exclusion of all other considerations.