The saintly grandma took her five-year old grandson to the beach. As he played in the water, she sat under her beach umbrella thumbing her rosary. Suddenly a huge wave hit the shore and washed the little boy into the ocean. Grandma screamed out to God for help, and within a few minutes her grandson was thrown back on shore. After a moment of feeling relief, she looked up to heaven in dismay and said, “but he was wearing a hat!”
Amazing how we humans can put the trivial and the serious on the same plane. Losing a life and losing a hat seem to fall into the same category.
Today Jesus expresses his dismay at a group of people who confused the trivial and the serious (Matthew 23:23-26).
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You pay tithes of mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier things of the law: judgment and mercy and fidelity. But these you should have done, without neglecting the others. Bling guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel!”
These religious “experts” impressed people with their religious practices. How admirable to take time to spread out their spices on a table and set aside exactly one-tenth for God. Engaging in such extremes certainly meant that they were a cut above the rest of people when it came to holiness.
Instead of being impressed with them, Jesus felt deep sadness toward them. Instead of being immersed in the things of God—judgment, mercy, and fidelity—they focused on the trivial—the things that others could see. These misguided experts equated the trivial with the important. They saw the “hat” as important as a child’s life.
So Jesus took the smallest creature he could think of, the gnat, and the largest creature he could think of, the camel, and used them to explain the mentality of the Pharisees. They considered the gnat to be a serious problem when it landed in their soup and took no note of the camel pushing its way into their kitchen. Jesus said that they were “hypocrites”—actors. They played the role of a devout, God-fearing person, while inside the story was completely different.
“…but inside they are full of plunder and self-indulgence.”
To me these hypocrites sound like boring people. Who would be attracted to people who are absorbed in religious minutiae? No wonder they had such few followers. Had they manifested the love of the Father the way Jesus did, they would be swarmed by people just as Jesus was.
This makes us ask ourselves, how deep is my spiritual walk with Jesus? Am I focused on gnats and swallowing camels? Our society is presenting camels to us—that it is okay to kill babies, mutilate children’s bodies, to have unrestrained sex with anybody—and we find ourselves swallowing these camels and buying into the rationalizations of such sins. At the same time, we react angrily when someone litters a sidewalk.
Jesus calls us to deep union with him. He is not satisfied with trivial compliance to the rules of our faith—although, as he states in this passage, these are not to be neglected. He gave his life for us so that we could be reunited to the Father in love. In turn he calls us to give our lives for him and to share fully in the relationship he has with the Father.
Jesus called the Pharisees and scribes blind guides. They not only lived a superficial religious life, they also tried to persuade others to follow them.
