[Jesus said:] "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mind, 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!" [Matthew 23:23-24]
We've got trouble--right here in River City.
But it might not be what you think. It might not be what you've been told, at least.
If you have ever seen the classic musical, "The Music Man," you know the scene. The mild-mannered people of River City, Iowa are managing just fine on their own until traveling salesman and crook "Professor" Harold Hill comes into town right off the train from the last town he swindled. Hill is selling towns all across the Midwest on having kids' marching bands, which he gets them to pay him to set up... and then he blows town with their money. It's a pretty lucrative hustle, but it requires Hill to do some crafty misdirection. He has to create a need for them; he has to make them think that having a marching band is not just a nice idea, but a necessity for keeping their children righteous and pure... you know, to keep them out of trouble.
So here's the sales pitch--and it's a doozy. "Professor" Hill gets everyone in town worked up with fear about the new pool table at the local billiard parlor. He breaks into song with a mystifying logic: "You got Trouble," Hill speak-sings, "and that starts with T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for Pool!" Well, with that air-tight reasoning, Hill gins up fear in the crowd that their sons and daughters will all become shady crooks and hoodlums if they get caught up in the pool-playing lifestyle. And that, Hill insists, is why they need to stop the menace of playing Eight-Ball by getting their children signed up to be in a marching band... which, conveniently, he can set them up with.
As snake-oil salesmen go, Hill is a king cobra, and the town buys it. They all fall for the scheme he has laid out for them, and they start shelling out cash for Hill to save their precious young children from the menace of billiards, because he has made them think that this is the real danger lurking in their town... rather than Hill, the snake himself.
Jesus would have seen right through a schemer like Professor Harold Hill. He surely saw through the same scheming that the Respectable Religious Crowd had persuaded the people with in the first century. Jesus calls out those suit-and-tie-wearing big-name religious leaders of his day, and here in these verses from Matthew 23, he basically says that they've gotten everyone fooled about the issues that really matter. He calls them out for being so precise in their giving of offerings that they even tithe on the herbs from their gardens, but they have missed out on the matters of substance--the "weightier things" as Jesus calls them: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. It's rather like Professor Hill's scheme: get everybody fussing about some small thing, and you'll miss the big one with a little bit of schmoozing and sleight-of-hand. The Respectable Religious Leaders of Jesus' day are so great at getting people to focus on whether they have done these tiny acts of devotion to God (a God who, by the way, has no need of our mint or dill or anything else from the spice rack), that it becomes easy to miss the things that should have occupied everybody's attention: doing justice, loving mercy, and nurturing trust. Like the town-hopping Music Man who bamboozles everybody in town into focusing on the terrible trouble of <gasp!> a pool table so they won't notice he's snookered them all out of their money, the Respectable Religious Leaders can get everyone to focus on their piety and applaud how religious they are, while they all leave justice and mercy out in the cold.
And Jesus just won't have it. He doesn't say it's wrong to tithe on your herbs, but he does insist that you can't use that as an excuse not to focus your attention where it needs to be. You can't use outward displays of religiosity as a way of ignoring the priorities that matter to God.
Now the temptation for us, all these centuries later, is to assume that we've got this all figured out ourselves, and that we don't have this problem anymore. We "know better," we all insist. We surely know that God doesn't care about us bringing offerings from the spices and herbs in our garden... and yet, we are so easily distracted by things that don't matter to God--or at least that matter far less than justice, mercy, and faithfulness. We may not have to contend with the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus' day or the smooth-talking sales-pitches of Harold Hill, but we do have an awful lot of Respectable Religious voices around, all sure that they know what things really matter to God, and that they will gladly teach them to us. And I can't help but wonder if we're all back in River City, hearing all over again that there's "Trouble that starts with T" and getting set up to be misdirected.
You know how it goes right? Someone claims they know what matters to God, and they have got it all printed up for you, and if only you'll just follow their pamphlet, you'll be good and righteous like them. The sales routines vary, but they all offer variations on the Music Man hustle: get focus fussing over things that don't really matter to God, and manufacture a fix for them, while the real problems go unaddressed. Sometimes the pamphlet says you have to have been baptized with a certain amount of water for it to "count"; sometimes it insists you have to be able to point to "the one moment" when you invited Jesus into your heart to be your personal savior (neither of those are things you'll find Jesus insisting on by the way). Sometimes the sales pitch dresses itself in the appearance of morality and throws around phrases like "family values" and insists that your family has to look a certain way, or that your relationships have to fit their pattern, or that you have to vote for people who have the same stances they have about those subjects. Sometimes they just fixate on whatever the controversial issue of the day is in the culture wars from cable news and tell you that that's the real problem--and if only people would do just like them, there wouldn't be any trouble. It's all the Harold Hill schtick--get people riled up about a minor issue to distract them, invent a villain (sometimes it's a pool table... sometimes it's a frightening "ism" of the day... sometimes it's a rotating cast of "those people" cast in the role of scapegoats), and then promise people a fix for the distracting problem (whether it's a marching band for sale, a self-help book, or a political party's agenda), and meanwhile, we have been successfully distracted from the heavier things: justice, mercy, and faith.
But here's good news, and because it's from Jesus, you know it's not a scheme or a sales-pitch: you don't have to believe any of those schemers and swindlers. Not the ones who tell you all that matters is how old you were or how wet you got when you baptized. Not the ones who insist you're going to hell if your family doesn't look like their cookie cutter one. Not the ones whose pamphlets tell you who to vote for. Those are all ways of getting tricked into being afraid of a pool table at the billiards hall when the real trouble is the one making the sales pitch. And Jesus tells us you don't have to fall for them any more. When he exposes the misguided focus of the Respectable Religious Crowd, he exposes it in all the other misguided attempts of history, even in our own moment, so that we don't have to get hornswoggled any more by folks with an agenda to peddle.
I know they look professional and polished. I know, with their handy pamphlets in hand and the list of things they want to make us fuss over, it is really easy to believe they know God's list of priorities. But here's the Jesus test: if it ain't about justice, mercy, and faithfulness, chances are it's not the main thing. If someone else in a suit-and-tie with a stack of reading materials to hand out gets off the train and says they know the "real" problem and it's not about those, you are hereby invited to call "Phooey" on them.
What matters now is what has mattered all along: justice, mercy, faithfulness. Focusing on those makes us more fully alive. Start there today. Start with the heavier things.
Lord Jesus, turn our focus to the things you say matter, and help us to be wise enough not to fall for the sales-pitches that get us distracted.
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