Plenty of people want to tell you who you are. Watch a night of television, and you’ll see! Don’t fast-forward through the commercials, of course. Just sit and take it all in. By bedtime, you’ll have several answers. “You are a discerning connoisseur, who deserves the best that technology can offer you.” That’s what the ads for sleek, shining automobiles will have told you. “You’re hungry, so go for it.” Ads for sour cream, fast food and sodas will offer this answer, through attractive, trim, athletic folks on the screen. Other voices will have given a contrary message, on behalf of weight-loss programs, anti-aging products and online universities: “You are so much less than you ought to be.”

            It’s not just television. Our culture tells us, on the one hand, that we’re important civic contributors but, on the other hand, we’re powerless cogs in an infinitely complex political and economic machine. We’re unique, delightful, quirky individualists whose momentary thoughts matter deeply in spaces like Facebook and Twitter, yet outside those spaces we’re nameless, faceless nobodies who will soon be left on the scrap heap of history. Incognito authors of unsolicited e-mails try to swindle us with words like “dearest beloved” while our friends and family sometimes say we are “fools” or worse.

            Into this mix comes Jesus, giving us two more answers, two more explanations of who we are. “You are the salt of the earth,” he says. “You are the light of the world.” We hope he’ll forgive us if those answers don’t immediately compute. We’ve been nurtured on slick advertising campaigns, after all. Words like “salt” and “light” seem embarrassingly prosaic.

Workhorse words

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