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BLINDED BY SECONDARY ISSUES
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” (Mt 23: 23-24)
Here the Lord is warning me about focusing on secondary issues, while losing sight of the whole point of God’s law, or “the weightier matters” that are“justice and mercy and faith.”
It’s easy to slip into neglecting “justice and mercy and faith,” while being very meticulous about some aspect of living our tradition. For example, I might be a member of the church choir, attending and singing all the church-services with zealous attention to every detail of the Typikon, while being complacent about, say, an outstanding resentment I am harboring against a certain someone. Perhaps the mere mention of them irritates or angers me, which should signalize to me that I’ve neglected “justice and mercy” (both of which are restored, when I responsibly make amends), but this fact doesn’t burden me nearly as much as those times when I skipped a church-service, for whatever reason. Or maybe I support the right causes and charities, while on a daily basis I am crippled, in my heart, by merely-human fears, say, of financial insecurity or of human opinion, rather than taking pause to fortify my faith; to let God be really present in my life.
Instead of continuously swallowing these “camels” and schlepping them around, today let me take pause to look at these ugly “camels,” and let God cast them out by the grace of His “justice and mercy and faith” in me. Lord, open my eyes to the “camels” I may have been ignoring, while focusing on what comes more easily to me, or the “gnats.”
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A very fair and honest point is being made here by Sister Vassa. As we strive to fulfill the words of the Apostle Paul: "but all things should be done decently and in order" (I Cor. 14:40); we can indeed neglect what Christ taught us about "justice and mercy." It is very important in parish life that we indeed do things decently and in order - think of the chaos caused by indecency and disorder! - yet, the core of the Gospel is revealed in the challenge to seek first "justice and mercy." When we blind ourselves to that, we have recourse to the Sacrament of Confession within which, by repenting of our sinful inclinations, we indeed restore "decency and order" to our interior lives and so recover our lost sense of "justice and mercy."
