Fr. Mark Patrick Hederman. You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. Salt and Light are two images suggesting the amazing reality of who we are if we only choose to realise this fact. Salt is a rock, perhaps the only one we eat to keep ourselves alive. It is also a mineral, a stable chemical compound, which never rots or decays. That is why it has been used for millennia as a way of preserving food, and as a way of embalming dead bodies, such as Egyptian mummies: Tutankhamun, or King Tut, for instance, who reigned as pharaoh in Egypt a thousand three hundred and thirty years before Jesus Christ came on earth.
You are the salt of the earth means that you are potentially everlasting. So valuable was salt in ancient Rome that soldiers were paid with it as others might be paid with silver or gold. The word salary comes from the Latin word sal, meaning salt. If you get a cut in your salary it probably means that you’re not ‘worth your salt.’
The light of the world, is another attempt to explain how powerful we really are, if we only reach down and turn on the switch. As of this weekend, the majority of the 30,000 households left without power by Storm Chandra will have had their power restored. They had been cut off from the energy supply normally available to us all. The Gospel this morning is telling us that we might all be in the same situation: the power available to us is being left dormant. We haven’t switched on the light.
About a hundred years ago, in 1923 in fact, a young engineer from Drogheda called Thomas McLaughlin returned to Ireland after a period working with Siemens in Berlin and studying hydroelectric schemes throughout Europe. He proposed damming the River Shannon and building an electric power station at Ardnacrusha. We owe a debt to such visionaries and to those who raised the million utility poles that brought power to the homes and farms of rural Ireland.
The electrification of Ireland was always on a voluntary basis. You could freely choose to participate in this new kind of energy and many refused the offer because they did not believe in it or because they could not afford it. What better way to explain the huge gift on offer in terms of Divine energy: The choice is yours, it is up to you. There is a secret subway that provides access to an alternative energy. It introduces you to a co-pilot who takes all the worry out of navigation, who is as canny as a sherpa, and who never intervenes unless invited to do so. This person is polite, imaginative, personable, sympathetic, patient, self-effacing, practical, and will disappear at the slightest hint of disapproval.
There is a great deal of discussion today about the surest, cleanest, cheapest, least toxic, most reliable energy in our world. Harnessing power is a major preoccupation for a world that wants to spin. The human race has used its ingenuity to a maximum in this regard. From the first discovery of fire through flint, to the hectic story of the Twentieth Century plundering expensive energy from an ever diminishing supply of fossil fuels, we have come to the more recently discovered uranium fuel. One pellet creates as much energy as a ton of coal or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas. None of these sources of energy is as potent as the power of the Holy Spirit blowing everywhere in our world. But we, as human beings, have to harness this power; otherwise it blows where it will. You can become a generator if ‘you fan into flame the gift of God which is in you’[2 Timothy, 1:6]. “If you have faith even as small as a mustard seed, as one uranium pellet, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you” [Matthew 17:20]. Ardnacrusha in Irish árd na croise means the height of the cross, that 2,000 year old utility pole, raised up in Jesus Christ to hold us aloft in the Holy Spirit.