Tithing spices
This week is on Matthew 23:23-24:
Jesus is preaching here against some common pitfalls in the Christian faith. (Technically it was the Jewish faith then, but you know what I am saying.) In these verses, he's talking about believers who are good at following rules, but are terrible at being good people. It's a common problem, and one we should be wary of.
The Pharisees and teachers of the law were the religious people of Jesus' day. I hate using the term "religious people" because too many churches use that to mean "Christians who aren't us" when it really could apply to any of us. The Pharisees, as far as I can tell, were sincere in their desires to be righteous, and to be good spiritual people. They went to all of the conferences, bought all of the books, wore the Christian t-shirts, etc.
So these religious people, who were like us, were good at doing what people said you have to do in order to be righteous. In a modern sense, they tithed, only ate organic free-range chicken, bought carbon credits, only wore clothes that were made by slaves old enough to have families of their own, voted pro-Israel in the Palestinian elections, gave to United Way, separated their recycling, and paid their temple taxes on time. They went out of their way to be "good" but were still no good!
Who goes through the trouble of sorting out a tenth of their spices? How desperate to be on the right path must you have to be to be going "one leaf for the temple, two, three, five, nine leaves for me?" And yet the Pharisees were doing exactly that! Even Jesus commended them on their attention to detail, but it wasn't enough. Righteousness is not a checklist, but a lifestyle.
Checklists are easy to verify from the outside, but character is hard to see. You can fake good character without having it. So most people focus on the checklist items, like the stuff in the old testament law. "Don't have sex with the following list of people and animals. Check. Don't eat the following foods. Check. Give 10% of everything to the Jewish temple. Check." If you covered your checklist like a bingo board, people would assume you were righteous. And so would you, if you were never tested on your character!
Jesus tells these believers with nearly perfect checklists that they've neglected the more important items: mercy, justice, and faithfulness. These are things you can't do on your own, or only around perfectly cooperative people. You have to relate to people, and those people have to cheat you and disappoint you. I've heard some friends say that the first year of marriage is hell. You learn that you're basically not a good person and that your spouse is basically not a good person either, although most people only learn the latter. But from that you have to work on your character or nothing works.
I think the same could be said about interpersonal relationships in general, when you have high stakes like in a business or confined space. How you handle things like a backstabbing coworker is a better benchmark of how righteous you are than whether you had perfect attendance or followed all of the items in the employee handbook. And what Jesus is saying is that these "righteous" people were not handling things correctly.
So how do you handle things correctly? It's complicated. You're not going to just add more items to the checklist. And that's what Jesus was getting at. We can't just look at our untested selves, or the list of things we get right, decide that we're good people, and then go around telling others how we think they should be. It's hypocritical to declare yourself a winner and then go about pointing out all of the losers.
Compared to God, there is nobody who is in a position to brag about their righteousness. The best we can do is keep that in mind and allow him to shape us without it getting to our heads. If we allow him to teach us, we will learn from life and become better people. In an eternal sense, it's less important how much we tithed, and more important how much we grew.
"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practised the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel."
Jesus is preaching here against some common pitfalls in the Christian faith. (Technically it was the Jewish faith then, but you know what I am saying.) In these verses, he's talking about believers who are good at following rules, but are terrible at being good people. It's a common problem, and one we should be wary of.
The Pharisees and teachers of the law were the religious people of Jesus' day. I hate using the term "religious people" because too many churches use that to mean "Christians who aren't us" when it really could apply to any of us. The Pharisees, as far as I can tell, were sincere in their desires to be righteous, and to be good spiritual people. They went to all of the conferences, bought all of the books, wore the Christian t-shirts, etc.
So these religious people, who were like us, were good at doing what people said you have to do in order to be righteous. In a modern sense, they tithed, only ate organic free-range chicken, bought carbon credits, only wore clothes that were made by slaves old enough to have families of their own, voted pro-Israel in the Palestinian elections, gave to United Way, separated their recycling, and paid their temple taxes on time. They went out of their way to be "good" but were still no good!
Who goes through the trouble of sorting out a tenth of their spices? How desperate to be on the right path must you have to be to be going "one leaf for the temple, two, three, five, nine leaves for me?" And yet the Pharisees were doing exactly that! Even Jesus commended them on their attention to detail, but it wasn't enough. Righteousness is not a checklist, but a lifestyle.
Checklists are easy to verify from the outside, but character is hard to see. You can fake good character without having it. So most people focus on the checklist items, like the stuff in the old testament law. "Don't have sex with the following list of people and animals. Check. Don't eat the following foods. Check. Give 10% of everything to the Jewish temple. Check." If you covered your checklist like a bingo board, people would assume you were righteous. And so would you, if you were never tested on your character!
Jesus tells these believers with nearly perfect checklists that they've neglected the more important items: mercy, justice, and faithfulness. These are things you can't do on your own, or only around perfectly cooperative people. You have to relate to people, and those people have to cheat you and disappoint you. I've heard some friends say that the first year of marriage is hell. You learn that you're basically not a good person and that your spouse is basically not a good person either, although most people only learn the latter. But from that you have to work on your character or nothing works.
I think the same could be said about interpersonal relationships in general, when you have high stakes like in a business or confined space. How you handle things like a backstabbing coworker is a better benchmark of how righteous you are than whether you had perfect attendance or followed all of the items in the employee handbook. And what Jesus is saying is that these "righteous" people were not handling things correctly.
So how do you handle things correctly? It's complicated. You're not going to just add more items to the checklist. And that's what Jesus was getting at. We can't just look at our untested selves, or the list of things we get right, decide that we're good people, and then go around telling others how we think they should be. It's hypocritical to declare yourself a winner and then go about pointing out all of the losers.
Compared to God, there is nobody who is in a position to brag about their righteousness. The best we can do is keep that in mind and allow him to shape us without it getting to our heads. If we allow him to teach us, we will learn from life and become better people. In an eternal sense, it's less important how much we tithed, and more important how much we grew.
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