Swallowing Camels

Matt. 23: 24You blind leaders! You strain out a small fly but swallow a camel.

I love this verse. In many translations it is stated, "You strain AT a gnat..." But it refers to an ancient practice of getting little bugs out of your drink - bugs that aren't kosher. The practice came from this verse in Leviticus 11:

20-23The only winged insects you may eat are locusts, grasshoppers, and crickets. All other winged insects that crawl are too disgusting for you to eat.

Jesus is, at least in part, referring to the religious tendency to be hyper-scrupulous while completely missing the point of faith. But I see more to this wonderful phrase than just that.

I think he's pointing out a human tendency here. We nit-pick and concentrate on the small stuff while completely missing what we really should be after. We think we're being wise when we're really being dumb.

Eating these small bugs was the same as eating camel: both were forbidden by Moses' law. In Leviticus 11: 4 - Nevertheless these shall you not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the hoof: as the camel, because he chews the cud, but divides not the hoof; he is unclean unto you.
So, in very simple terms, we can say, "You concentrate on small things while making a huge error."

I think the "blind guides" Jesus was talking to - the Pharisees who participated later in killing him - were glaring examples of this common fault frequent in all our thinking.

This is common, for instance, in politics, where pundits concentrate on pointing out some failure in an opponent - chipping away at their character or mistakes they made - while the pundit veers away from dealing with the information that actually needs to be dealt with. The Pharisees dealt with Jesus this way. They were looking to trip him up and degrade him in the eyes of his fans. Meanwhile, they swallowed the camel of missing the point that he was the Messiah they were looking for, and they wound up conspiring to have him killed.

Essentially, the point here is to use this verse as a reasoning tool to deal with how we process all information. For instance, science is built on studying minutia in order to reveal truth, but in the process can miss truth. It can dismiss that which it can't study as irrelevant, that is, for instance, the existence of God. Likewise, the Pharisees were focused on religion and missed the very reason they had a religion. They destroyed that which they were hoping for, and for the very reason that they were too concentrated on gnats. They couldn't see the forest for the trees.

They were so busy straining out gnats they failed to see they had swallowed the camel.