Taste and See
Wisdom's hidden flavour
This Sunday is, in the old money, “Septuagesima,” which means it is, by a very rough approximation, seventy days before Easter; and so, equally roughly, thirty days before Ash Wednesday. Churches used to go into purple from now to reinforce the point. It’s a reminder for us to start thinking about and planning our Lenten discipline now.
The modern lectionary doesn’t reflect this: despite Candlemass, we are encouraged to think of ourselves in post-Epiphany rather than pre-Lent. Not but what, this Sunday’s readings can still help prompt our feet to take their first little steps towards Jerusalem.
Our Lord compares His followers to salt and light (Matthew 5:13-20). Salt gives flavour to food; light gives sight. But you wouldn’t want to replace your food with salt, and you wouldn’t want to be blinded by the brightest of light. As much as I enjoy perhaps too much salt on my chips and soy sauce on my sashimi, a plate full of salt or a cup of shoyu would not form part of a healthy diet. Salt is a wonderful condiment for bringing out the flavour that is already there, and indeed for preserving it. Light, likewise, makes visible things that are already, but otherwise invisibly, there.
As salt to food and light to hidden things, so is Christ to the Law and Prophets. As He says, He has not come to destroy them, but to fulfil them. He is not replacing the nourishment of God’s Law with a bucket of salt; he is bringing out its hidden flavour. He is not burning the Law with his lamplight; he is revealing what lies hidden within. So, as the Psalmist sings, can we “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8).
Cast your mind back to last Sunday, and the Beatitudes. In the sixth of them, Jesus gave us the purpose of life: to see God. The five Beatitudes leading up to that were the pathway towards that goal, poverty of spirit leading to purity of heart; then the final two told us that if we can keep that vision in front of us, then even though we suffer like Jesus did for righteousness’ sake, we can still know God’s joy and profess His peace. The vision of God, the Beatific Vision, is the key.
But the ancients did not understand seeing in quite the way we do. We tend to separate the viewer from whatever it is he or she views, as though the world were one very wide screen TV. But for the ancients, Aristotle among them, seeing something implied a certain identification with it. We like to say, “you are what you eat;” they would have said, “you are what you see.” And there is great truth to this. Think of how what your eyes suck in from, say, your mobile ‘phone or computer screen does to you: how it changes the way you see everything and interact with the world. For good or ill, what you see can really change the world for you.
This is why St Paul tells us that we can begin the “beatific” way of seeing here and now. In this Sunday’s Epistle, he speaks of the “hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world” (1 Cor 2:7). That wisdom was already there, but hidden, waiting to be revealed. It eludes our natural abilities; the hidden treasure is not something we can dig up by ourselves: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Cor 2:9). But those hidden treasures are real, just waiting for the light to show them.
But how can we learn to see? It’s not enough for someone to be taught, fed information from outside: “For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him?” The obvious answer (to us, anyway), is Christ, the great Teacher. Yet even to be taught by Him is not enough. He cannot remain an external exemplar, a model of good behaviour. We have to internalise Him. We have to become one with Him, participate in Him. We have, in Paul’s word, to “have the mind of Christ;” to see with His eyes, to love with His sacred heart.
This is where the salt can bring real flavour to the discussion. We’re used to the visual imagery of Scripture: the healing of the blind, seeing God and yet living, visions of the heavenly Jerusalem. But there’s that risk, especially for us moderns, of separating the seer from what is seen. Jesus’ salt imagery qualifies this with a sense of greater immediacy. After all, what sense is more immediate than taste? I can describe things and places I have seen, I can mediate them to you with my words or draw a picture, but a taste, a flavour – the only way to know it, is to taste it. If you’ve never tasted it, I can’t describe it. And once you taste it, you know it straight away, immediately, without reflection or thought.
So it is with our knowledge of God. We can talk about God all we like, we can try to describe God, but what we need to aim at, on our knees, is something more like tasting God. The vision of God, even glimpsed in a glass darkly, is in a way more like taste than sight: immediate and incommunicable. And it is a vision that makes us what we see, so that we are “partakers of the Divine Nature” (2 Peter 1:4), not destroyed by Christ’s grace, but perfected by it. Christ is the salt which lifts our humanity to the divinity for which it was originally intended. “As for me, I will behold thy presence in righteousness: and when I awake up after thy likeness, I shall be satisfied with it” (Ps 17:16). There is no greater satisfaction for the hungry soul.
So, we should hardly be surprised at the means Jesus chose to communicate His knowledge to us most intimately. He is the Divine Word, and speaks to us through Scripture, certainly, through the Law and the Prophets, to which He calls us and warns us to be faithful. And yet He offers us His most perfect and most intimate self-revelation not through our ears, or our eyes, but through our mouths, in Holy Communion. Hidden in bread and wine, He offers us the taste of God. This is the highest way that we can come to know, with St Paul, “Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
Only by the salt of God’s grace can the full flavour of righteousness bloom in our hearts. But it mustn’t end there, guarded within. Self-righteousness is no righteousness at all. True righteousness is always oriented towards others. It means seeing the world around us, and especially one another, with Christ’s eyes. With Him dwelling in us, we learn to recognise Him dwelling, hidden, throughout creation, and to love Him there. We become the salt which opens up the hidden flavour of God’s wisdom.
Salt and light: taste and see. Not a bad motif for your Lenten preparations, I would wager. Keep close to the Blessed Sacrament, make a commitment receive the Lord as often as you can. Free your eyes from things that trap and corrupt you. Make a commitment to time spent offline, and better still, put it to prayer instead, to wordless contemplation of God. Make time and space to savour Him. And share that flavour, share that vision. Salt is no use if it isn’t sprinkled, and your light is no use under a bushel. Seek the hidden Christ. In whom can you see Him hiding this Lent? How can you help them to find Him hidden in themselves?