Family illnesses and other problems caused Margery Wilson, later to become an outstanding actress, author, and lecturer, to have to try to earn money to support her mother and sister while she was still a young girl. She got a job playing a piano two hours per day, during luncheon and dinner breaks for the orchestra, in a theatre in Cincinnati. But about that time, some well-meaning social workers had put through a child-labor law, which was applied to her. Two indignant women came with a police officer and took her bodily out of the orchestra pit. She was under age and should be in school, they said. They were going to see that children did not work - and that was that! But they seemed not to care that at the moment she was the only support of two members of her family. Miss Wilson says, "They were very sentimental about a child’s playing the piano two hours a day, but they weren’t even sympathetic about shelter and food and medicine for three people."1
Those people had counterparts in Jesus’ days. They were religious people. In fact, they were tithers! Those are hard to come by in our day, and when you find one, you try to give him or her all the encouragement you can. But some Jesus knew did not need encouragement in their tithing. They were already doing a rather complete job of that. The Law said that they were to tithe everything that they grew, and they took that requirement literally and seriously, even to the extent of tithing garden herbs grown in very small quantities.
Jesus apparently believed in tithing, but he did not believe that that was the whole of one’s responsibility. He was quite critical of these people, not because of their tithing, but because of their neglect of matters he considered more important than the meticulous tithing of garden herbs. The Law said something about "justice and mercy and faith," too, and he was disturbed that they were ignoring these altogether.
He told them that they were like a person who carefully strains a beverage to be sure any tiny gnat that might have gotten into it is removed, and then cheerfully swallows a camel. The fact that such would be impossible did not bother Jesus. What he wanted was for his listeners to see the ridiculousness of what they were doing, and he drew a ridiculous picture to aid them in seeing.
Their problem was that they were not seeing things in their true proportions. A gnat looked bigger to them than a camel. Their priorities were out of order, and they were giving first-rate attention to things that were much less important than some other things which they were neglecting completely.
But their malady did not die out at the end of the first century. Even today there are lots of people who can’t tell a gnat from a camel. Confused priorities are still widely prevalent, and strained gnats are not hard to find. It is not just the so-called bad people, however, who have this problem. It is common among good-intentioned persons, too, and if we look around a little in our own lives, we may find some strained gnats unpleasantly close by!
Testimony To Errors In Judgment
These strained gnats may be a testimony to errors in judgment. They may be evidence that one, perhaps with the best of intentions, was simply wrong in what he or she counted of greatest importance.
In his Letters From The Earth, Mark Twain ridicules the concept of religion and of heaven which a celestial visitor to earth finds among people. He says that this heaven "hasn’t a rag of intellectuality in it anywhere." He finds this very strange, since on earth humans exalt the intellect "above all things else in (their) world," and enthrone "it there under the arching skies in a supremacy unapproachable." He thinks it incredible that "this sincere adorer of intellect and prodigal rewarder of its mighty services here in the earth has invented a religion and a heaven which pay no compliments to intellect, offer it no distinctions, fling to it no largess: in fact, never even mention it."2
I am not at all sure that Twain gave an accurate picture of this religion. Certainly he did not present it as the New Testament does. Though the intellect is not worshiped in the Bible, it definitely is not ignored or discounted. One is expected to use one’s mind, to think, to reason, to plan, that he or she may avoid errors and learn to live according to the truth.
Yet try as one may, one will never be able to know all things or to keep from making some mistakes of the mind. And these may cause one at times to appear unable to distinguish a gnat from a camel.
Parents, for instance, often strain out gnats in rearing their children. They don’t mean to, but they make errors in their judgments of the relative importance of things. Thus, outward appearance may be stressed more than inward being. Social acceptability may be placed ahead of divine approval. Material things may take priority over service. Education may be emphasized while religion is considered an elective. Sports may be entered into enthusiastically while church attendance is neglected. In the matter of discipline, little things may call forth as severe a punishment as more serious transgressions.
The happiness of numerous homes is diminished by the inability to distinguish a gnat from a camel.
It is not just in the home, however, that these errors in judgment are made. No institution or area of life is insulated against them. Any place one looks, one is likely to see strained gnats, and they may be testimony to honest mistakes of the mind.
Result Of Misdirected Attention
They are not always the consequence of good-intentioned errors though. Sometimes there is more responsibility behind them than that would seem to imply. They may be the result of misdirected attention, of absorption in matters of minor importance which grew to large proportions as attention was devoted to them.
In June, 1965, Israel I. Sander of Tel Aviv wrote a letter to "The Jerusalem Post" in which he referred to a matter then occupying the attention of certain Orthodox scientists in New York. They were trying to discover why the Torah allowed Jews to eat honey. Mr. Sander said, "Of course, the common-sense answer would be that they wanted something sweet and they did not have anything like sugar." But there is a rabbinic rule that if an animal is unclean to eat, so is anything that comes from its body. For hundreds of years, rabbis had explained this "exception" by saying that the honey did not really take anything from the bee’s body, but merely passed through its body on its way from the flower to the beehive. But Orthodox scientists now admit, Mr. Sander said, that there are enzymes in the bee that affect the honey. So they were working hard to see if they could show that the honey really did not come from the bee’s body!3
If one gives enough attention to a matter of extreme insignificance, it may come to seem unusually important to one.
The church, too, can be guilty of absorption in things of minor significance. It can give so much attention to the mechanics of its operation that it neglects to proclaim its message or to grow in its own understanding of that message. Numbers can become so important to it that it forgets about or plays down Christian commitment. It can concentrate on its buildings and fail to reach out in service. Bishop Otto Dibelius once wrote: "A genuinely religious confirmation class is of greater importance than an all-day session of an ecumenical conference."4 It is easy to forget what is most important in the life of a church!
Individuals also may get things out of proportion by undue attention to some things. For instance, one may concentrate on one’s job so exclusively as to forget about family obligations or the need for spiritual development. One may become so interested in athletics as to neglect responsibility to the church. One’s hobbies may occupy his or her interests to the detriment of service to others.
Straining gnats! One may not intend to be doing this, but it comes about as the result of misdirected attention.
Evidence Of Warped Interests
Strained gnats may likewise be evidence of warped interests. Indeed, if one’s attention is misdirected, it follows naturally that his or her interests become warped.
Hornbeck, the reporter in the play, Inherit The Wind, is a rather skeptical person. He has come to the little town where a young school teacher is about to be tried for teaching evolution. A carnival atmosphere prevails in the town, and Hornbeck is taking it all in. One hawker comes by yelling, "Hot dog?" and another, "Bible?" Hornbeck up-ends his suitcase, sits on it, and muses: "Now that poses a pretty problem! Which is hungrier - my stomach or my soul?" And he buys a hot dog!5
Paul Tillich was traveling in Europe as World War II was about to break out, and he wrote in his diary one night, "Q is very unhappy, but not about world history, of which he notices nothing, but about their daughter’s divorce."6 Tillich should have been able to empathize with this man in that situation. He surely recognized the legitimacy of personal interests. Yet he knew that more earth-shattering events were taking place then than one divorce, and it was these events that interested him most.
A sense of the relative importance of things is a vital need of every person; but when one’s interests become warped, it is not easy to maintain the proper perspective. Then one may begin straining out gnats and swallowing camels!
This means that cultivation of interests is in order, and here there is so much to be learned from Christ. When one looks at him and the interests which directed his life, one sees a person whose mind penetrated to the depths of reality and perceived clearly the things that mattered most and those that were less important. There was no straining out of gnats with him, because his pure interests gave him a perspective which ruled out such folly. And he can help us, too, toward that kind of perspective.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote once to his high school daughter, "You have got to devote the best and freshest part of your energies to things that will give you a happy and profitable life."7 Straining out gnats and swallowing camels does not contribute to "a happy and profitable life." It is only as one sees and lives for the things that count the most that one’s life begins to be meaningful and satisfying.
But beyond that, the kind of activity Jesus condemned here incapacitates one for the usefulness that ought to flow from one’s life. Preoccupied with the trivial or the relatively insignificant, one is unable to give sufficient attention to matters of major importance.
The knights of King Arthur’s Table had sworn to ride for twelve months looking for the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. King Arthur was not there when they made their decision, and he was very disturbed when they told him about it. He said to them:
Go, since your vows are sacred, being made:
Yet - for ye know the cries of all my realm
Pass thro’ this Hall - how often, O my knights,
Your places being vacant at my side,
This chance of noble deeds will come and go
Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires
Lost in the quagmire!8
We cannot do much about challenging the "chance of noble deeds" if we spend our time and energy straining out gnats and swallowing camels. Christ calls us not to leave our places vacant at his side, but to be there, sharing his interests and seeking to see things from his perspective, not only that we may find meaning and fulfillment, but also that our lives may make the difference they are meant to make.
1. Margery Wilson. I Found My Way, pp. 93-94. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1956.
2. Bernard DeVoto, Editor. Mark Twain: Letters From The Earth, p. 19. Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc. (Crest Books), 1963.
3. Israel I. Sander, "New Approach To Religion," in "The Jerusalem Post Weekly," June 18, 1965.
4. Otto Dibelius. In The Service Of The Lord, p. 268. New York, Chicago, San Frarcisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.
5. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Inherit The Wind, p. 13. New York, Toronto, London: Random House, Inc., 1955, Bantam Pathfinder Edition, 1963.
6. Paul Tillich. My Travel Diary, p. 101, edited by Jeraki C. Brauer. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1970.
7. Andrew Turnbull, Editor. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Letters To His Daughter, p. 27. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1963, 1965.
8. Alfred Tennyson, "The Idylls Of The King."