What a strange phrase. Salt is used here as a verb, “Salted”, to imply you will be preserved or saved by fire. Both salt and fire can burn us and cause us pain, but the similarity ends there, because salt preserves while fire consumes and transforms.
We are Baptized in the Holy Spirit and with fire. In other words, we are filled with God’s Love, which is a form of energy that burns within us and transforms us.
Our path to safety and wholeness is paradoxically not to try and protect ourselves behinds walls of wealth and power, but to empty ourselves, and allow ourselves to be consumed by Love.
To be “salted with fire” is to become Christ in the world, to become love. Allowing this Love to burn us up will not only save and preserve us, but it will enable others around us to be saved. Christ’s self-emptying love is what enables us to be “salted with fire”, to be baptized into Christ.
“Everyone” is offered this salting with fire. God comes to us disguised as our life, weather we have the privilege of baptism or not. And we can choose to become the love that approaches us or to self-isolate, protect and defend our ourselves against it. The path that seems like a dying is the saving one. The losing of ones self in the fire of God’s love is the only way to preserve our true self and others.