Two words jumped out at me in this morning’s Gospel: outside, inside. Here was Jesus, really giving it to the scribes and Pharisees:
You cleanse the outside of cup and dish, but inside they are full of plunder and self-indulgence.
— Matthew 23:25
Those two particular words whisked me back in time to a book I loved as a kid: Inside Outside Upside Down. In it, the Berenstain Bears humorously taught me all the prepositional phrases even before I knew why they’re important at all.
I let the Gospel words percolate for a while.
Lectio divina: What is the Lord saying to me today? I still didn’t have my answer when I was fumbling around my kitchen making breakfast.
But then the flies found me.
They were everywhere. Like a scene from the movie The Amityville Horror! I grabbed a swatter and started swatting. But for every few I smashed, another crowd sprang forth out of nowhere. Amityville now morphed into an image of Medusa’s hair!
The source wasn’t a mystery, really: five days of family visiting with their young kids running in and out of the house through open doors. Our garbage can, just outside one of them, was so full that its lid simply yawned open in defeat.
And while that can had been moved to the curb for “trash day”, the flies it attracted had already moved on to higher ground inside our house.
I knew what was coming if I didn’t deal with these invaders fast: an army of maggots marching out of hidden corners days from now. Like little invaders out of a Trojan Horse.
As I swatted away in fury, the Gospel swung back at me.
You strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.
— Matthew 23:24
I hate gnats almost more than flies. We get a lot of them during hot and humid weather. This year is an “El Niño” year and we’re really feeling it. Flies love all this heat and rain and humidity, too. They find company in the clouds.
But gnats? They assault my eyes, nose, and mouth in their quest to find purchase. They’re almost too small to see, let alone swat. A fly I can see. The gnat? Hardly. So I get it: I want to strain that gnat out. It’s a pain.
But what about this camel? What is Jesus accusing us of swallowing? A camel is awfully big. Pretty hard to “just get in” without effort.
I don’t think He is talking about literally swallowing here. I think He means something more subtle: What are the things we “put down”, subvert, ignore, and so forth? The things we give lip service to, but don’t really digest?
The things we bury. We say we’ll deal with them later.
Resentments? Grudges relabeled as discernment? A need to be right?
None of these look like camels going down. But the ill effects on the soul? Profound. They settle in and get comfortable.
The Pharisees “strained out the gnat”. They tithed their mint and dill down to the leaf—meticulous about even the smallest obligations of Jewish law.
But true judgment, mercy, and fidelity? You can’t exactly count them. They don’t come with a measuring cup.
What scale weighs mercy? What tells you your judgment was just?
Maybe that’s why Jesus uses the camel. It’s almost ridiculous to imagine swallowing a camel.
Yet, isn’t that what we do? We put down the really important things—the big things that are harder to confront..
But I think Jesus wants us to pay attention to the camel.
What we bury doesn’t disappear. It works its way back out, one way or another.
But here’s the hopeful flip side of that same truth: it works both ways.
What we let take root — if it’s good — doesn’t stay hidden either. Mercy becomes mercy lived. Fidelity becomes faithfulness practiced, quietly, year after year, until it’s a kind of steadiness people can feel standing next to you. Justice becomes the way we actually see and treat another person, not just a word we use about ourselves.
None of it shows up on a résumé or earns a “like” on social media. But it becomes visible in how we live — and that’s not a coat of polish on the outside of the cup. That’s the cup actually becoming beautiful, from the inside, because something true is finally living in there.
Cleanse first the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may be clean.
— Matthew 23:26
Inside first. Not because the outside doesn’t matter — but because it’s the only outside worth having. Everything else is just a shine we’re trying to maintain on our own.
I started the morning thinking about prepositions. I ended it in my kitchen, still swatting, asking a harder question than the one I started with — not how do I measure up, but what am I letting take root in here?
Get your feet grounded. Lift your head. And let Him transform you from the inside out.
