(Fifth Sunday of the Year (A): This homily was given on February 4, 2023 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani. Read Isaiah 58:7-10; Psalm 112:4-9; 1 Corinthians 2:1-5, Matthew 5:13-16.)
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Fifth Sunday 2023]
If you walked around on a bright, sunny day in July with a lit flashlight
in your hand, acting as if you needed it to see, people would probably think
you were crazy!
Why? Because light only makes a difference where there isn’t any—and there’s plenty of light around on a bright, sunny day in July!
If you went down to Westerly Town Beach after Mass this morning with a big box of salt, and poured the contents of the box into the water, saying, “The ocean needs this,” people would definitely think you were crazy! I sure would!
Why? Because salt only makes a difference where there isn’t any—and, as we all know, there’s more than enough salt in the water off Westerly Town Beach.
Now this may sound obvious to us—and maybe it is in the physical dimension of life—but it definitely is not obvious in the spiritual dimension. Christians, for example, will listen to the Gospel we just heard today—where Jesus tells us that we are to be the salt of the earth and light of the world—and they’ll respond by saying, “But that’s hard, you know. It’s not easy for me to be a Christian at work, where people are swearing and telling dirty jokes and back-stabbing each other every day. It’s not easy to resist the temptations my friends throw at me on the weekends to drink and cause trouble. It’s difficult to be patient with my family and to forgive the people who hurt me.”
They make this complaint, as if being “light” and “salt” is supposed to be easy.
But it’s not supposed to be easy! And that’s precisely the point Jesus is making by using these images! Light only makes a difference where there isn’t any! When Jesus tells us to be “light” for the world, he’s presuming that we’ll be surrounded quite often by darkness—the darkness of hate, the darkness of unforgiveness, the darkness of greed and materialism, the darkness of lust and impurity. He’s presuming that we will face these realities at work, and at school, and in the Church, and even sometimes at home! When he tells us to be “salt” for the earth, he’s presuming that we will constantly be confronted with “tasteless” situations (if you’ll pardon the pun)—situations, in other words, where faith, hope, love and truth will not be present.
I ask you, why was Mother Teresa considered to be such a brilliant “light”?
It wasn’t because she lived in the midst of saintly people who loved God and one another with a perfect love. It was because she lived and worked in the midst of terrible darkness—the darkness of poverty, illness and death.
Her light made a difference, precisely because there wasn’t much light
around her.
Now most of you (if not all of you) are lay people who live and work “in the world.” That means you’re called to be light and salt in a unique way. Here we encounter a truth which is not commonly understood by Catholics today, and it’s one of the biggest reasons why we’ve had many of the social problems we’ve had in our culture in the last 50 years. Let me read to you now paragraph 898 of the Catechism, which quotes a passage from Lumen Gentium, one of the documents of Vatican II:
By reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will. . . . It pertains to them in a special way so to illuminate and order all temporal things with which they are closely associated that these may always be affected and grow according to Christ and may be to the glory of the Creator and Redeemer.
This means,
quite simply, that as lay people you are called to be light and salt by
bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ into the marketplace—i.e., into the
ordinary, mundane situations of daily life.
You’re not supposed to forget about your faith—and the principles of
your faith—when you’re at work, or at school, or at the soccer field. You’re supposed to take your faith with you everywhere, such that it influences
what you do and don’t do, what you think, how you conduct your business, and
how you treat other people. That’s what
the Catechism means when it says you’re to engage in temporal affairs and
direct them according to God’s will.
As I said a few moments ago, the failure of Catholics to understand this truth is at the root of many of our contemporary social problems.
I’ll give you one example. I once heard a talk by the late Dr. William Marra, who was a philosophy professor at Fordham University for many years. In this talk Dr. Marra asserted that one of the major reasons that abortion became legal in our nation was because the majority of Catholic doctors, nurses, lawyers, judges, and college professors were silent on the issue in the years prior to Roe v. Wade, when the subject was being hotly debated in our society. He said that if they and other Christians had been “lights” in their professional lives and had stood up for the truth, their witness for life could not have been ignored. But they chose not to be lights; consequently, we saw yet another verification of Edmund Burke’s famous maxim, “All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”
But let’s be clear about it: some of these lay people failed because their priests failed to be good examples for them and to teach them the full truth of the Gospel concerning the sanctity of human life from the moment of conception until the moment of natural death!
There are some Christians who believe that Jesus calls us to retreat from the world, and ignore the moral, social, and political issues of the day. Jehovah’s Witnesses (who are not Christians) have a similar perspective, which is why you don’t see Jehovah’s Witnesses getting involved in public life. In attempting to justify their position, those who embrace this view will quote a Biblical text like 2 Corinthians 6:15 which says, “What accord is there between Christ and Belial, what common lot between believer and unbeliever?“ Their attitude is, “Forget about the world, because it’s going to you-know-where in a hand-basket, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
The Catholic Church teaches exactly the opposite, as that quote from the Catechism indicates. The Church says that lay people are called by God to be a leaven for positive change in every dimension of our culture. To paraphrase Jesus in John 17, Christian lay people are supposed to be “in the world” but not “of the world.” The attitude of some Christians is, “We would never seek employment in radio or television or journalism, because the media and the secular press are so anti-Christian.” The Catholic Church responds by saying, “That’s all the more reason for you to get involved! How else will things ever change for the better? We need good Catholic lights in Hollywood, and in television, in radio, and in the secular press, precisely because there isn’t much light in those places at the present time. Remember, light only makes a difference where there isn’t any!”
But why should we make this effort to be salt and light when it’s so incredibly difficult? Simply because our own salvation is at stake, as well as the salvation of many other people. When Jesus talks here about salt losing its taste and being thrown out and trampled underfoot, he’s warning us that if we don’t take this message seriously we put our eternal salvation in jeopardy. And the final line of the text makes clear that others may not make it to heaven if we fail them in this regard. As Jesus said, “Your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.”
Those words of Jesus bring to mind Jill Gaccione. Some of you have been around long enough to remember Jill. She lost her only brother when he was murdered at 19 years of age, and then she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma during her senior year of high school. She died, tragically, just one week after graduation. But Jill had experienced a conversion to Christ at a Steubenville summer youth conference a couple of years before her death, and that newfound faith burned brightly in her heart throughout her illness—so much so that it converted her stepfather. “Your light must shine before others . . .” He could sense the peace and strength Jill had through faith and the sacraments of the Church—he knew it was real—he knew she wasn’t faking it—and it changed his life. He perceived that she had something special on the inside, and he wanted that grace for himself.
Cancer is unquestionably a horrible form of “darkness”—as some of us know by experience. But that’s precisely why Jill’s witness was so powerful! Light makes a difference where there isn’t any! Her light made a visible difference precisely because she was living in the darkness of a terminal illness. And that changed her stepfather, who was eventually baptized and received into the Church.
So let’s not be like those Christians who complain about how hard it is to be light and salt; let’s resolve, by the grace of God, to be light and salt—and to help change the world, or at least our little corner of it.
