This weekend millions reflect on Christ's call. ". . . You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world ..." For those who listened to the Sermon on the Mount the message was clear. The rock salt from the shores of the Dead Sea gave savour to food and prevented decay. Low quality salt soon lost its flavour and was good for nothing except to make safe the temple courtyard in times of rain. Each follower of the master was challenged to be both salt and light and as visible, in genuine goodness, as a city set upon a hill. We still today refer to people of integrity and love as the "salt of the earth".
A great Scripture scholar has done much to bring healing salt and guiding light to his five million people of Milan. Cardinal Carlo Martini SJ, when appointed Archbishop of the world's largest diocese, felt, like Jonah before Nineveh, "weak, poor, naked and blind". He was called to face a vast secular city of much coldness and indifference to religion. He wondered how to lead lost people out of loneliness to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. He started with small groups of 50 young people and led them to pray the Scriptures. The seed grew. Now over 5,000 gather for the monthly time of prayer in the cathedral and many lapsed and nonbelievers also come in quest of truth. Groups in churches and recreation halls have joined in the search and the Cardinal no longer feels like a defenceless David before the terrifying Goliath of apathy. All come to absorb the living word of God, to reflect in a healing silence, and to pray as the spirit leads. Each participant goes forth as salt and as light. The "Miracle of Milan" has happened.
What of us? Murders, robberies and violent attacks on the most vulnerable of our people have brought terror where there once was peace. We see drug addiction spread like a deadly plague. The murder of a much loved headmaster in a London school is seen as but one of many in a mounting series of horrors. This senseless killing awakened Great Britain to a new awareness of the rising tide of evil. It is admitted now that many are unable to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil. "Where there is no vision the people perish."
Anglican, Richard Chartres, at 48, was enthroned last Friday in St Paul's as Bishop of London. He is gifted, compassionate and fearless. He reminds us that we have been, for long, living on the moral stock of our Christian heritage. As our capital runs out we are in real danger of a new barbarism where there will be no protection for the weak, the aged, the handicapped or the stranger in our midst. When we can no longer trust one another and there are no standards of truth neither democracy nor working market systems can survive. Our brutality and our greed have created a world hideous and full of menace.
It is useless to blame police or governments. The only solution is in the mind and heart of each of us. ". . . All we like sheep . . . The answer lies not in accusing others. Only with repentance can come reconciliation and renewal. Each of us must come with the saving salt and the comforting light of which Christ speaks . . . Cardinal Newman saw what well might come. He offers real solace and abiding hope . . . Let us but raise the level of religion in our own hearts and it will rise in the world . . . Those whose prayers come up for a memorial before God, open the windows of Heaven, and the foundations of the great deep. And all the waters rise . . ."