There's a prayer attributed to St. Teresa of Ávila that I keep coming back to. Maybe you know it. It's the kind of prayer that seems simple at first, and then quietly rearranges everything:
Christ has no body now on earth but yours;
no hands but yours; no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ
must look out on the world.
Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which He is to bless His people.
Sit with that for a moment. Not "Christ has a body and yours helps sometimes." Not "Christ works primarily through angels and miracles, but you can chip in if you feel called." No. Christ has no body now but yours. No hands but yours. No feet but yours.
What do we do with a claim like that? Is it the most audacious thing in Christian spirituality, or is it quietly, stubbornly true? This Sunday's readings seem to suggest we sit with the second possibility.
"You Are the Salt of the Earth"
Today's Gospel from Matthew picks up exactly where last week's Beatitudes left off. Jesus has just told his disciples who is blessed—the poor, the mourning, the meek, the persecuted. Now he turns to them and says something worth lingering over:
"You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot."
—Matthew 5:13
Notice the grammar here. Jesus doesn't say "You could become the salt of the earth if you try hard enough." He doesn't say "Some of you might be the salt of the earth." He says you are. Present tense. Indicative mood. It's not an aspiration. It's a declaration about who they already are.
Which raises a question: if we already are salt, then the danger isn't that we might fail to become something. It's that we might stop being what we already are. How does that happen? How does salt lose what makes it salt?
WHAT SALT ACTUALLY DID
In first-century Palestine, salt wasn't just a flavor enhancer. It was a preservative—the primary means of keeping meat from rotting in a world without refrigeration. It was also used to seal covenants, purify offerings in the Temple, and was so valuable it was sometimes used as currency (the word "salary" comes from the Latin salarium, related to salt).
When Jesus calls his followers "salt of the earth," he seems to be saying something like: you are what keeps the world from decay. You are what preserves what is good. Without you, things rot.
Less a compliment, maybe, than a vocation. Something to sit with.
"You Are the Light of the World"
Then Jesus goes further:
"You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven."
—Matthew 5:14-16
Here's what strikes me about this. In the Old Testament, "light of the world" is language reserved for God. Isaiah 60: "The LORD shall be your light forever." Psalm 27: "The LORD is my light and my salvation." And now Jesus—who in John's Gospel will say "I am the light of the world"—turns to a ragtag band of fishermen and tax collectors and says: You are the light of the world.
Why would he say that? To these people? The same ones who will betray him, deny him, flee from him, argue about who's the greatest? What does it mean that Jesus sees light in people who haven't yet proven themselves worthy of carrying it?
I think Teresa of Ávila was wrestling with something similar. If Christ has no body now but ours, then Christ has no light now but ours. We aren't merely reflecting some distant divine glow. We are the lampstand. We are the city on the hill. And what happens if we hide?
Isaiah's Blueprint: What Does the Light Look Like?
If we're wondering what it actually means to be salt and light—what it looks like to be the body of Christ on earth—today's first reading from Isaiah offers something remarkably concrete:
"Share your bread with the hungry,
shelter the oppressed and the homeless;
clothe the naked when you see them,
and do not turn your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn."
—Isaiah 58:7-8
There's a striking sequence here. Your light breaks forth when you feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked. Not when you pray the right prayers (though pray them). Not when you hold the right doctrines (though hold them). Not when you attend the right liturgy (though attend it). The light and the mercy seem to be bound up together—maybe even the same thing.
Isaiah doesn't say "Then your theology shall be correct" or "Then your worship shall be pure." He says "Then your light shall break forth like the dawn." What if the light is the mercy? What if they aren't two separate things at all?
This is where Teresa's prayer starts to feel less like poetry and more like a blueprint. Yours are the hands with which Christ feeds the hungry. Yours are the feet with which Christ goes to the homeless. Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks at the naked and the oppressed.
And if those hands stay folded? If those feet stay still? If those eyes stay closed? Then what happens to the compassion? Where does it go? Maybe it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe that's exactly the point.
THE CONTEXT OF ISAIAH 58
Isaiah 58 opens with a fascinating scene. The people are fasting and wondering why God doesn't seem to notice. God's answer is unsettling: "Is this the manner of fasting I wish? Do you call this a fast day, a day acceptable to the LORD?" (Isaiah 58:5).
The fast God wants, it turns out, isn't skipping meals. It's releasing those bound unjustly, setting free the oppressed, sharing your bread, sheltering the homeless. What if the fast God desires is justice itself?
This is the same prophetic tradition that runs from Amos ("I hate, I despise your feasts") through Micah ("What does the LORD require?") to Jesus himself ("I desire mercy, not sacrifice"). It keeps asking: what is worship, really, if it doesn't change how we treat each other?
The Mystery of Divine Dependence
Here's what I find myself wondering about most with Teresa's prayer: it seems to make God dependent on human beings. The omnipotent Creator of the universe, the One who spoke galaxies into existence, the Alpha and Omega—and he has no hands but ours?
How do we hold that? God doesn't need anything. God is self-sufficient, self-existent, the actus purus of Aquinas who lacks nothing. And yet the entire logic of the Incarnation is that God chose to enter creation through human flesh. God chose to need a mother. God chose to be fed, carried, taught to walk. God chose vulnerability.
And after the Ascension, that logic didn't stop. It extended. The Incarnation didn't end when Jesus ascended. It continued—in the Church, in the Body of Christ, in us. Paul puts it simply:
"Now you are Christ's body, and individually parts of it."
—1 Corinthians 12:27
Not "you are like Christ's body." You are Christ's body. The same body that healed the sick, fed the multitudes, touched lepers, wept at tombs, and was nailed to a cross. That body now has your hands, your feet, your eyes.
What if the Incarnation isn't a past event we commemorate, but an ongoing reality we're invited to participate in? Every time we feed someone, could it be that Christ feeds them through us? Every time we comfort someone, that Christ comforts them through us? Every time we stand with the suffering, that Christ stands with them through us?
And if that's true, what does it mean when we don't?
Paul's Weakness and the Power of the Spirit
Today's second reading from 1 Corinthians might seem like the odd one out, but I wonder if it's the key to everything:
"When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling, and my message and my proclamation were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of Spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God."
—1 Corinthians 2:1-5
Paul seems to be telling us something about how we are salt and light. Not through eloquence. Not through strength. Not through impressive credentials or strategic planning. Through weakness. Through the crucified Christ working in and through our inadequacy.
This matters because when Teresa says "Christ has no body but yours," the temptation is to hear it as a crushing burden—as though everything depends on our competence, our energy, our heroic effort. But what if it depends on something simpler? Our availability. Our willingness to show up, weak and trembling, and let the Spirit work through us.
Maybe the light that shines through us isn't our light at all. Maybe it's Christ's light shining through cracked vessels. Maybe the salt isn't our saltiness, but the grace of God preserving the world through imperfect, stumbling, frequently bewildered human beings who simply said yes.
TERESA KNEW ABOUT WEAKNESS
St. Teresa of Ávila spent twenty years in a Carmelite convent before experiencing the deep conversion that transformed her prayer life. She was chronically ill for most of her adult life. She was investigated by the Inquisition. Her reform of the Carmelite order was opposed at every turn by powerful ecclesiastical authorities.
She didn't write "Christ has no body but yours" from a position of strength. She wrote it as a woman who knew intimately what it meant to be weak, sick, opposed, and doubted—and to discover that God works precisely through those cracks.
Perhaps this prayer isn't a call to try harder. Perhaps it's an invitation to stop pretending we need to be strong enough, and to let God use what we actually are.
"Do Not Turn Your Back on Your Own"
There's a line in today's Isaiah reading that's easy to miss: "do not turn your back on your own." The Hebrew is mibesarcha—literally, "from your own flesh." Do not hide from your own flesh.
I find myself sitting with that phrase. The hungry person is my flesh. The homeless person is my flesh. The immigrant, the prisoner, the addict, the person I'd rather not see—my flesh. Because in Christ there is one body, and when one member suffers, all suffer together.
Teresa's prayer makes the same point from the other direction. If Christ has no body but ours, then every body is potentially Christ's body. The suffering body on the street corner, the exhausted body working a third shift, the trembling body in the hospital—Christ has no body but those bodies too. And Christ has no hands to reach them but our hands.
What happens when we turn away from our own flesh? When we hide from the suffering of our neighbor? Could that be what it looks like to hide the light under a bushel basket—not some grand act of apostasy, but simply the quiet turning away?
When Salt Loses Its Flavor
Jesus' warning about salt losing its saltiness is worth pausing on. What does that even look like? How does it happen?
Maybe salt loses its flavor slowly, through contamination—absorbing so much of its environment that it stops being distinctive. I wonder if that's a question worth asking ourselves, honestly, as a Church. Where have we absorbed the values of the culture around us so thoroughly that we've stopped tasting different? Where have we grown comfortable enough that the Gospel's strangeness has faded into background noise?
And what does Jesus say happens to flavorless salt? It's thrown out and trampled underfoot. Not because it's wicked—because it's useless. Maybe the thing we should fear most isn't opposition but irrelevance. Not persecution, but the slow, quiet process of becoming indistinguishable from everything else.
CAN SALT ACTUALLY LOSE ITS FLAVOR?
Pure sodium chloride can't lose its saltiness—it's a stable chemical compound. But the salt available in first-century Palestine was rarely pure. It was often mixed with gypsum and other minerals from the Dead Sea region. If the sodium chloride leached out (through exposure to moisture or ground contact), what remained looked like salt but tasted like chalk.
There's something haunting about that image: something that looks exactly right from the outside but has lost its essential substance. It still has the appearance—the right words, the right rituals, the right structures. But the thing that actually preserves and flavors has quietly leached away. When has that been true of me? Of us?
The City on a Hill
We hear the phrase "city on a hill" invoked in all sorts of contexts—political speeches, national mythologies, visions of greatness. But it's worth going back to the text and asking what Jesus actually meant by it.
He isn't describing a nation. He's describing his followers. And the point doesn't seem to be that they're impressive. The point is that they're visible. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. That's not a boast. It might even be a warning. You're exposed. Everyone can see you. What are they seeing?
Teresa's prayer reframes this in a way I find myself returning to. The city on the hill is the body of Christ—us, the community of believers through whom Christ's compassion reaches the world. If that city goes dark, if those eyes stop looking with compassion, if those hands stop blessing, if those feet stop going about doing good—then the darkness isn't just our private failure. Something is lost that can't be recovered any other way. Because Christ has no other body.
Letting the Light Shine
The final line of today's Gospel is deceptively simple:
"Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven."
—Matthew 5:16
Your good deeds. I notice Jesus doesn't say "your correct opinions" or "your doctrinal precision" or "your liturgical preferences." He says your good deeds. The ones Isaiah listed: feeding, sheltering, clothing, refusing to turn away from your own flesh. What if the light that draws people to God isn't our arguments or our institutions but simply our mercy?
And notice the purpose: not "so that people will be impressed with you," but "so that they may glorify your Father." The light points beyond itself. The hands of Christ don't draw attention to themselves—they draw attention to the One who sends them.
There's something beautiful in how Teresa's prayer captures this. It doesn't say "you are Christ." It says Christ works through you. The eyes are yours, but the compassion is Christ's. The feet are yours, but the mission is Christ's. The hands are yours, but the blessing is Christ's. You are the instrument, not the source. But without the instrument, the music doesn't play.
What Are We Being Asked?
If Christ has no body but ours, then maybe every act of mercy is a small act of incarnation. And maybe every refusal is a small refusal of it. Every time we shelter someone, we participate in Christ sheltering them. Every time we walk past, Christ has no feet to stop.
I don't think this is meant to produce guilt. I think it's meant to produce wonder. Consider what it implies:
- If Christ has no hands but ours, then our ordinary hands—the ones that make meals, sign checks, open doors—are the means by which Christ blesses the world. What would change if we believed that?
- If Christ has no feet but ours, then our daily movements—to work, to the store, through the neighborhood—are potentially the journeys Christ takes toward those who need him. Where are our feet taking us?
- If Christ has no eyes but ours, then every person we encounter is someone Christ is looking at through us. How are we seeing them?
Isaiah promises that when we live this way—when we share bread, shelter the oppressed, clothe the naked—"then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed." Not only are others helped. We ourselves are healed. Something in us is restored. The body of Christ is made whole again.
A Staggering Freedom
Here is what I keep coming back to: God could have arranged things differently. God could have continued to intervene directly—pillars of fire, manna from heaven, dramatic theophanies on mountaintops. Instead, God chose incarnation. God chose to work through flesh. First through the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth. Then, after the Ascension, through ours.
This means God has given us an astonishing freedom. The freedom to be Christ's body—or not. The freedom to be salt—or to slowly lose our flavor. The freedom to be light—or to hide it under a bushel basket. God, it seems, will not override our refusal.
And that is either the most daunting realization in Christian theology or the most liberating. Probably both. Because it means our lives matter in ways we can barely fathom. Every small act of mercy is Christ acting in the world. Every cup of water, every meal shared, every door opened, every moment of genuine attention given to another human being—that's the Incarnation continuing. That's the light shining. That's the salt preserving.
And it means that the question "Where is God?" has a strange and intimate answer. God is wherever we bring God. God is wherever our hands reach, our feet walk, our eyes look with compassion. The light shines wherever we carry it.
So carry it.
Feed the hungry. Shelter the oppressed. Clothe the naked. Do not turn your back on your own flesh. Open your hands, the ones Teresa says are the only hands Christ has left. Use your feet, the ones she says are the only feet he has to go about doing good. Open your eyes—the ones through which his compassion must, must, look out on the world.
Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours. The world is waiting. Go.