Eyeing the Gnat or the Camel?
AM Psalm 37:1-18 • PM Psalm 37:19-42
Amos 9:1-10 • Rev. 2:8-17 • Matt. 23:13-26
There is nothing mysterious about today’s reading from Matthew. It is confrontational, unambiguous, and powerful. Jesus calls out the Jewish leaders of the times and delegitimizes them.
But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.
Jesus sees through their outward displays of righteousness and knows what wickedness lives in their hearts. He castigates them for the heavy, religious burdens they lay on the shoulders of others but which they are unwilling to lift a finger to help move. He denounces their true and selfish desires—wanting always the center of honor at banquets, the prime seats in synagogue.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!
Jesus has spoken truth to power before and in doing so, continues on the arc of all whistleblowers—enduring consequences that begin with disbelief through ridicule, heretic-labeling, bullying, vindictiveness, isolation, and finally, public humiliation, imprisonment and death.
When I perceive so much of the same hypocrisy in our world today, it comforts some part of me to hear those scribes and Pharisees called out so loudly and so clearly. Is that rooted in some pettiness in me? I don’t know. I do know that when I overthink sometimes I create grey-ness, ambiguity. But in Matthew’s account, the declarations are not vague. Jesus is crystal clear.
Written by Bernadette Reda
Grateful for the St Paul’s community, and for the healing effects of a walk in the woods with my dog.