How do you like your orange juice? With pulp? No pulp? Medium pulp? If you make gravy, do you strain it to remove any lumps? Do you ever use loose-leaf tea and filter off the leaves once it’s brewed?
There are lots of applications where filters and strains are very useful in our lives—not only with food, but also with furnaces, oils, air purifiers, cameras, etc. We use these tools to eliminate stuff we don’t want so that we keep more of what we do want. I suspect that we don’t always recognize or appreciate the variety of ways that strains and filters are used in our daily living.
It’s also interesting to consider that Jesus used the idea of straining in His confrontation with the Jewish leaders of His day. Indeed, at the beginning of taking to task these leaders in Matthew 23:24, Jesus condemned this group for straining a gnat to swallow a camel. As for gnat straining in the context of this whole chapter, Jesus is pressing into the behaviors and motives of the religious leaders and exposing their hypocrisy, duplicity, insincerity and the outright harm they are inflicting, all under the guise of religion and righteous living.
Truly, I think that it can often be easy for religion to major on the minors at the expense of keeping the majors as the main thing. Pause and reflect.
What would be the major thing in following Jesus? Based on John 13:35, love is the essential defining characteristic for being a Jesus follower. Genuine love is ground zero. If love is the major thing, then we can zero in on our actions, words, motives and outlook being grounded in love. We love because we are loved.
As for things that are minor, religion can easily get wrapped up in stuff that should be small or secondary. For example, there have been more than a few heated conflicts around things like: wearing makeup, the rapture, clothing choices, types and lengths of fasting, tattoos, music styles, seats in church, jewelry, ripped jeans and heaps more.
All of this reminds me about a conversation my dad had with our resident church lady when I was a little girl. At that time, there were loads of hippies coming to our church where my dad was the lead pastor. Many of these hippies were dirty, grungy, unkempt, smelly, glassy-eyed, foul-mouthed and highly improper. They would straggle into church with no shoes, ripped jeans, no bras, oily hair, and some of them lugged along drug paraphernalia like bongs and pipes. Our church lady was really uptight about these highly disrespectful young people stepping into the sanctuary of God with their greasy hair and dirty, ripped clothes. “At least they can shave and cut their hair!” She snapped at my dad.
My dad replied, “Glady, their hair length is the least of God’s worries. He’s after their hearts, and down the road, maybe their hair and clothes will get resolved.” Glady, aka Gladys, was straining gnats based on the clothes and image of the hippies. She was missing the big picture that Jesus emphasized, which was loving people. Let’s be certain that we use our strainers and filters for constructive outcomes rather than hurtful judgments!
