Who is the true light of the world is Jesus Christ. But he also wants his followers, reflecting that light, to illuminate his brothers. In today’s passage, with three comparisons, he describes what his disciples should do in the midst of society:

– They must be like salt, which spices and gives flavor to food, prevents food corruption and, moreover, is a symbol of wisdom;

– They must be like the light, which illuminates the path, which guides in doubts, which dispels the darkness of those who suffer from blindness or are misguided;

– They should be like a city set on top of the hill, guiding those who are looking for a way through the wasteland and offering a point of reference and shelter to travellers.

Reflection

In the list of these Doctors (lately, three Doctors have been added to the list: Teresa of Jesus, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of the Child Jesus), Saint Isidore shines with his own light, of whom it has been said that he was the «last Father of the Western Church».

A man of great erudition, he collected the knowledge of the time, especially in his twenty-volume work Etymologies, read and quoted continuously in the following centuries. He also left us, in his De ecclesiasticis officiis, a tasty reflection on the Hispanic liturgy. From that treatise we read today, in the Office of Reading, how a bishop in his diocese. Isidore was the great teacher of Christian thought in the Middle Ages, a «testimony and source of human knowledge.»

We will not all be doctors and teachers. But we can all be witnesses, salt and light for others: parents, educators, catechists, pastors of the community. We do not need to have much erudition, because the wisdom of God is also possessed – and sometimes in greater depth – by simple people, full of faith and docile to the Spirit. If we are not recognized doctors, we can be evangelizers, heralds of God’s love.

Fr. Antony Majeesh George Kallely, OFM.