Today’s Reading from Matthew 23: 23-26 is a clear message to those who are woefully separated from God, His Son, and Church. Jesus specifically speaks to those who have positions of authority in religion. And, He speaks to all of us:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin,
and have neglected the weightier things of the law:
judgment and mercy and fidelity.
“You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin” describes how hypocrites would get out of tithing. While farmers would sacrifice an ox, or part of a field of laboriously grown grain, the hypocrites fixed a market in herbs that could be grown in small flowerpots without any actual work. Those in the Jerusalem establishment would then make a big deal of presenting a tiny basket of easy-to-produce herbs as their tithe while honest believers did hard work to bring donations of cattle, sheep, and grain to the Temple. Honest people knew they were being taken advantage of. That is why so many of them welcomed Jesus: He told the truth.
“But these you should have done, without neglecting the others.
Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel!”
“Strain out the gnat and swallow the camel!” describes the deadly spiritual illness in which vanity takes over those who lead others, blind to the fact that they, themselves, are headed straight for “woe”. Today’s “scribes and pharisees” include those who call themselves as “scientists”, garbed in degrees. They obsess about insignificant amounts of trace gases and measure them in complicated scientific/liturgical services. “If we do not control these gases, the world will become warm, and we will die.”, say Babylon’s latest scribes and pharisees with utter seriousness.
While warning about fund-generating Imaginary Problems, they blind themselves the death and murder going on around them. Every day, 3,500 unborn American children are being destroyed by abortionists. Those worrying about Imaginary Problems while the slaughter goes provide a perfect example of those lost souls who“strain out the gnat and swallow the camel!”
The Son of God tells us what the scribes and pharisees end up with forever:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You cleanse the outside of cup and dish,
but inside they are full of plunder and self-indulgence.
Blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup,
so that the outside also may be clean.”
“Woe.” Twice in this passage, Jesus tells those who embrace Imaginary Problems to benefit themselves that their eternal fate is “woe”. What is “woe”? What comprises the eternity assigned to those who lie to get money and status from their neighbors?
Woe: “Deep distress or misery, as from grief; wretchedness. Misfortune; calamity; sorrow; dismay.”
Can we who claim to be Christian while using birth control pills and chemicals that destroy our own children avoid unending “woe”? Can those in schism, who keep Pro-Life people from uniting in The Church to stop abortion, avoid an eternity of “woe”? Can those who use Imaginary Problems to take from their neighbors and end up “full of plunder and self-indulgence” have any end but “woe”?
The most important thing we can do: Avoid an eternity of woe.
