Be Distinctive

Luke 14:34-35 – “Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Imagine you just arrived at home after a hard day of work. It will be awhile until dinner is ready, but you are hungry and want a snack to tide you over. You are especially hankering for something salty and crunchy, so you open the pantry to look for a bag of potato chips. You have to dig a bit, but you find an opened bag in the back of the shelf. Your taste buds are already starting to salivate in eager expectation of the satisfaction of taste, crunch, and calories. As you pull out that first chip and chomp down on it, though, you discover the bag was probably opened two years ago, pushed behind other items, and forgotten. How can you tell? The chip is stale. There is no crunch. It bends but does not break under your teeth. It does not taste like a salted, fried, slice of potato. Instead it tastes like a combination of all the boxes in your pantry. Needless to say, you throw the bag out as quickly as possible and find something unopened that tastes like it is supposed to. Why? There is no hope for those chips. There is nothing you can do to restore them to good taste.

That image is not too different from the one Jesus is trying to convey in the short parable in Luke 14:34-35. You cannot restore the taste of something that has lost it.

This parable comes after an extended section of warning of what it takes to follow Jesus: loving him more than any other person (including ourselves) and a willingness to surrender all to him. These are hard words. Most people in the world do not live this way, including many who claim to be Christians. But Jesus gives us this warning of saltiness to let us know that even though following him requires us to be distinctive from most of those around us That is what we are called to be. What good are we if we simply absorb the habits and lifestyles of everyone else? Like the stale chip that tastes like pantry boxes, we have lost our value.

It is a challenge to be distinctive, but it is the challenge you were made. It is good. Let’s not get stale.