DAILY GRACE
August 25, 2020, Tuesday of the 21st Week of Ordinary Time
Scripture: Matthew 23:23-26
‘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!
‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Meditation:
“‘. . . justice and mercy and faith.”
Jesus is still at it in today’s Gospel, taking aim at the practices of the scribes and Pharisees (but not at their teachings). Like the prophets of old, Jesus offers a stinging critique of practices that were not wrong in themselves but which were carried to such an extreme that their meaning was lost. He wants to bring the scribes and Pharisees into fully conformity with God’s will, which is never simply an external practice.
The passage could almost be part of the Sermon on the Mount with its emphasis on seeking God’s kingship and justice (see Matt. 6:33). It is the perennial temptation of devout people to replace these by overemphasizing externals, the way Jesus teasingly portrays the scribes and Pharisees as doing: not satisfied with paying tithes on their crops as the Law requires, they even measure out 10 percent of the tiny seeds of garden herbs. (Whole cumin seeds are the size of caraway or fennel seeds.) Such scrupulosity can cause one to lose track of what today’s Gospel sums up as “justice and mercy and faith.”
Why the Pharisees make such distinctions is easy enough to understand: It’s much easier to focus on things that are more within our reach, and external things are under our control. After all, justice, mercy, and faith are attributes of God! Tithes, even of herbs, are at least within our reach. The Apostle Paul called this seeking “a justice of one’s own” (see Phil. 3:9). It means, Paul hints, keeping oneself outside the realm of grace.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, you spoke plainly but mercifully to the scribes and Pharisees. Break through my self-deceptions, too, so that I keep “justice and mercy and faith” as my central priorities.
Contemplation
Seek first God’s kingdom and justice (see Matt. 6:33).