hotcoffee
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Woe Number 4 on the Teachers of the Law and the Pharisees
The commentary says this.
Another commentary puts it this way.
A new commentary that I just ran across explains the gnat v. camel problem.
In other words.... Jesus was telling the Pharisees that they were missing the bigger picture.
Matthew 23:23 “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 practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. 24 You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
The commentary says this.
"This is a humorous picture which must have raised a laugh, of a man carefully straining his wine through gauze to avoid swallowing a microscopic insect and yet cheerfully swallowing a camel. It is the picture of a man who has completely lost his sense of proportion."
Another commentary puts it this way.
The Pharisee was careful to strain his drinking water lest he swallow a gnat, the smallest of unclean animals. However, Jesus revealed that while he was putting such emphasis on the tiniest details, he was missing the very obvious and more important truths of judgment, mercy, and faith. Hypocrites always have misplaced priorities because they worship self instead of God.
A new commentary that I just ran across explains the gnat v. camel problem.
Jesus illustrates the inconsistency in verse 24 with a witty illustration about Pharisees who were more scrupulous than Pharisaic legal rulings required. If a fly fell into one's drink, Pharisees taught that it must be strained out before it died, lest it contaminate the drink (compare Lev 11:34); but they decided that any organism smaller than a lentil (such as a gnat) was exempt. Since most of us today would not want a gnat dying in our drink either, we may have sympathy with a Pharisee who for a different reason--passion for purity--went beyond the letter of the law to remove it. Nevertheless, these Pharisees were so inconsistent, Jesus said, that they concerned themselves with purity issues as trifling as a gnat but did not mind swallowing a camel whole. In ancient writings gnats are cited as the prototypically smallest of creatures; camels, which were explicitly unclean under biblical law (Lev 11:4), were the largest animal in Palestine.
In other words.... Jesus was telling the Pharisees that they were missing the bigger picture.