Uncontaminated Christians

10 June 2025   Matthew 5:13-16

“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?”  Matthew 5:13​

Salt, sodium chloride, NaCl, cannot lose its taste. It can’t not be salty. Ever.

If salt has “lost its taste” it is not because the salt has lost something. It is because something has been added. The salt has become contaminated, adulterated. Making salt “unsalty” is a kind of adultery – it is adding something that makes the whole less.

So, the teaching here is that we Christians have to be pure, uncontaminated, unadulterated, 100%...what?

Someone may say that we must be pure, 100% Christians, but that simply begs the question: What does that mean? What does it mean to be an uncontaminated Christian?

Generations of preachers have tried to answer this question with long strings of sparkling metaphors and pious stories of saintly people that make pew-sitters smile, all the while oblivious to the disturbingly concrete answer that preachers avoid because it means that pew-sitters won’t smile at them anymore.

We are uncontaminated Christians when we are 100% Jesus.

It may not make many pew-sitters smile, but it is most certainly the wholeinner logic of Catholic teaching. Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. We believe that it is food not like other food. When we eat ordinary food, it becomes what we are – if we eat an egg, we do not become more chicken; if we drink a glass of milk, we do not become more cow (or soybean, or almond, or oats). Ordinary food, regardless of its origin, becomes what we are. With the food of the Eucharist, however, because of the Real Presence, we become what it is, viz. the life of Christ Himself.

The Eucharist – and each of the other sacraments in their own way – transform our lives into the life of God. So, St. Paul is not speaking in any metaphor when he says, “For me, to live is Christ” (Philippians 1:21). Likewise, “It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20) and “You are the body of Christ, and individually members of it” (I Corinthians 2:27) and “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (II Corinthians 5:17) are not figures of speech, but concrete facts if the Real Presence is true. Uncontaminated Christians bear in their persons, purely and only, the life of Jesus, and that makes them, by the mysterious alchemy of grace, the perfect version of themselves. It is what Jesus was driving at when he said, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

Metaphors are designed to take the edge off things, and make them safe to handle. They are G ratings – appropriate for all audiences, family friendly, non-toxic. Metaphors are soft filters that make everybody look good, but they are not very useful in dangerous times when there are real enemies who mean real harm. Then you want to know exactly what makes true Christians, and hope that there are some nearby. Then you want to know the people who know Jesus, because Jesus is living in them.