Catholic Commentary
Fourth Woe: Tithing Minutiae While Neglecting Justice, Mercy, and Faith
23“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. But you ought to have done these, and not to have left the other undone.24You blind guides, who strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel!
Matthew 23:23–24 criticizes the Pharisees for meticulously tithing minor herbs while neglecting justice, mercy, and faith—the weightier matters of God's law. Jesus condemns their inverted priorities through the vivid image of straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel, exposing how external religious precision divorced from moral virtue becomes spiritually empty.
Jesus doesn't cancel the tithe—he diagnoses the spiritual disorder of doing the hard external stuff while ignoring the heart: justice, mercy, and faith.
Typologically, the gnat and the camel represent the inversion of properly ordered love (ordo amoris). Augustine would later describe sin as precisely this: the disordering of loves, loving lesser things with greater intensity than they deserve, while neglecting the greater. The Pharisees' error is not that they love the law too much, but that they love a distorted image of it — its surface without its soul.
Catholic tradition has found in this passage a charter for what the Catechism calls the "hierarchy of truths" (CCC 90) and the proper ordering of the moral life. The Church teaches that while all of God's commandments bind, they are not all of equal weight. The First Commandment orders all others; the theological virtues (faith, hope, charity) order the cardinal virtues (justice, prudence, fortitude, temperance). This hierarchy is not a license to neglect any command, but a framework preventing the spiritual disaster Jesus diagnoses here.
St. John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on Matthew (Hom. 73), singles out this passage to warn against those who are "exact in small things, remiss in great ones," noting that this was the peculiar temptation of the outwardly religious. St. Augustine echoes this in De Doctrina Christiana, insisting that the whole of Scripture is ordered to the double love of God and neighbor, and any reading that does not serve that love has missed the point.
St. Thomas Aquinas (ST I-II, q. 100, a. 6) explicitly addresses Christ's distinction between the moral, ceremonial, and judicial precepts of the law, arguing that the moral precepts — supremely justice, mercy, and faithfulness — are the end to which ceremonial precepts (like tithing) are directed as means. When means are pursued as ends, religion collapses into what Aquinas calls "superstition."
Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium (§ 36–37), specifically invokes this passage to warn against "self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism" — a religiosity obsessed with rules and appearances that has lost the heart of the Gospel: mercy and justice for the poor. The Catechism's treatment of justice (CCC 1807) and mercy as a work of charity (CCC 2447) grounds both virtues in the imitation of God himself, who is "rich in mercy" (Eph 2:4).
Contemporary Catholics face this temptation in surprisingly specific forms. A parishioner may track every Friday abstinence scruple while nursing decades of bitterness toward a sibling — straining the gnat of dietary law while swallowing the camel of un-forgiveness. A Catholic institution may police its internal procedural orthodoxy with ferocious precision while treating underpaid workers unjustly, or ignoring the poor at its gates. A social-media Catholic may catalogue others' liturgical infractions while performing none of the corporal works of mercy. Jesus' "both/and" is the corrective: do tithe your mint — keep your Friday abstinence, your Holy Day obligations, your rosary — but examine whether those practices are forming you in justice toward your employees, mercy toward the stranger, and genuine faith in God rather than pride in your own observance. The practical question this passage demands each Catholic ask is unsettling in its simplicity: What camel am I swallowing?
Commentary
Matthew 23:23 — "The weightier matters of the law"
Jesus names three specific categories — mint, dill, and anise (or cumin, per some manuscripts) — as the objects of Pharisaic tithing. These were garden herbs of negligible monetary value; the Mishnah (Maaserot 4:5) confirms the rabbis debated whether such herbs required tithing at all. That the Pharisees extended the tithe even to these minutiae signals not piety but legalistic overreach that crowded out more fundamental obligations.
The key phrase is τὰ βαρύτερα τοῦ νόμου — "the weightier things of the law." This is not Jesus' invention; the rabbis themselves distinguished between "light" (qal) and "heavy" (chomer) commandments, but the Pharisaic tradition often inverted the proper ordering, treating external precision as the measure of holiness. Jesus names three "weightier" realities: κρίσιν (justice/judgment), ἔλεος (mercy), and πίστιν (faith/faithfulness). These three words are a deliberate echo of Micah 6:8 — "to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God" — and of Hosea 6:6, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice," which Jesus has already cited twice in Matthew's Gospel (9:13; 12:7). The triad is not accidental; it maps the whole of the moral life: right relations with neighbor (justice), compassionate generosity beyond strict obligation (mercy), and right relation with God (faith/faithfulness).
Critically, Jesus says: "But you ought to have done these, and not to have left the other undone." This is the Catholic "both/and" in miniature: he does not abolish the tithe. External, embodied religious observance retains its proper place. But it must be ordered to and animated by the interior life of virtue. Divorced from justice, mercy, and faith, the tithe becomes a monument to self-congratulation rather than an offering to God.
Matthew 23:24 — "Strain out a gnat, swallow a camel"
This is one of the most arresting images in all of Scripture, and it functions on multiple levels simultaneously. Literally, the gnat (κώνωπα) was the smallest of unclean animals under Levitical law (Lev 11:20–23, insects without proper legs), and the camel (κάμηλον) was the largest unclean land animal in Palestine (Lev 11:4). Both are ritually impure; observant Jews strained their wine lest they accidentally ingest a gnat. The image is thus of a man so obsessed with avoiding the microscopic impurity that he ignores the monstrous one sitting in his cup.
The wordplay in Aramaic — the language Jesus likely spoke — intensifies the satire: the words for "gnat" (galma) and "camel" (gamla) are nearly homophonous, suggesting this saying was originally a memorable Aramaic proverb. The Greek translation preserves the absurdist humor.