Mint, Dill, and Missing the Point
Matthew 23:23-24 - “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 faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!”
Your Bible app has a 247-day streak. You haven’t missed a Sunday in months. You tithed to the penny last quarter. You even volunteered for the thing nobody wanted to do.
And your wife can’t remember the last time you asked how she was doing. Not the “how was your day” on autopilot while scrolling your phone. Actually asked. Looked her in the eye. Wanted to know.
We are capable of extraordinary religious precision and breathtaking relational negligence at the same time. And the scariest part is how easy it is to mistake one for the other.
Jesus paints the most absurd image in the Gospels here. Picture a man sitting at dinner, meticulously straining his drink through a cloth to make sure no tiny insect slips through. In the Jewish purity system, swallowing a gnat would make you ceremonially unclean. So he’s careful. Thorough. Filtering every sip.
Meanwhile, he’s gulping down a camel. Hump, hooves, and all.
It’s supposed to make you laugh. And then it’s supposed to make you wince. Because it’s ridiculous until you recognize it.
The Pharisees tithed their herb gardens down to the last sprig of mint. They measured out dill and cumin with the precision of pharmacists. These weren’t major crops. These were kitchen herbs. And they tithed them anyway, because the details mattered to them. They were meticulous about the small things.
Jesus doesn’t criticize the meticulousness. He says “these you ought to have done.” The details aren’t the problem. The problem is what the details replaced. Justice. Mercy. Faithfulness. The things that cost you something. The things you can’t check off a list because they require your actual heart.
We gravitate toward the measurable because the measurable feels safe. Did I read today? Check. Did I give? Check. Did I show up? Check. There’s a quiet satisfaction in completing the spiritual tasks. A sense that we’re doing okay. That God is pleased. That we’re on track.
But the weightier matters resist measurement. How do you quantify mercy toward someone who hurt you? How do you check off faithfulness in a marriage that’s slowly going cold? How do you track justice for the person you’d rather not think about? You can’t. And because you can’t measure them, they’re easy to neglect while still feeling spiritually productive.
That’s the trap. The mint and dill become substitutes for the things that actually cost us something. We master the manageable and neglect the meaningful. And we don’t even notice, because the checklist keeps telling us we’re fine.
Jesus isn’t asking us to stop tithing the mint. He’s asking why we think the mint is enough. What if the spiritual disciplines we’re most proud of are the very things allowing us to avoid the harder, quieter obedience God is actually after?
The gospel frees us from this. Because the weightier matters aren’t another performance standard we have to reach. They’re the overflow of a heart that’s been wrecked by mercy. We extend justice because we’ve received it. We practice faithfulness because Christ has been faithful to us. The camel we keep swallowing is the illusion that our precision earns us something. Christ already earned it all.
Application: What’s the camel you’ve been swallowing while carefully straining gnats? Ask God to show you one weightier thing you’ve been avoiding, and take one step toward it today.
Prayer: “Jesus, sometimes I’m so careful with the small things and so careless with the things that matter most. Forgive me for hiding behind my checklist. Show me the weightier thing I’ve been avoiding. Give me the courage to do it and the strength that comes from making myself available as Your surrendered servant. Amen.”
-PK