He Did Not Tell Them to Stop Counting the Mint

The fear underneath every one of these questions is a slope.

It goes like this. If I ask about one rule, I will ask about a second. If I get an honest answer about the second, I will start looking at the third and the fourth, and I have watched people do exactly that, and I know where two of them ended up, and it was not anywhere good.

So a young man decides, at some point, usually around nineteen, that the safest thing is not to start. He puts the question down. He keeps everything. And he tells himself that this is faithfulness.

I understand it completely, because the slope is not imaginary. Every family in this community can name somebody who began with a question and finished somewhere none of us wanted them to be, and the older ones are not being irrational when they flinch at the first one.

But here is what I want to put beside that, and I want to put it gently, because I am not standing outside this.

There is a sentence in Matthew 23 that gets quoted constantly by people who want to be free of small rules, and it has four words on the end of it that almost nobody quotes, and those four words change what the whole sentence is doing.

The famous half of the verse

Jesus is speaking to men who were careful. That word matters; they were not careless people and He is not attacking carelessness.

They tithed their herbs. That is the detail. Not their income, their herbs, the little pots of mint and anise and cummin growing by the kitchen door, counted out and a tenth set aside, because the law said a tenth of the increase and they intended to be exact about it.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith. (Matthew 23:23, King James Version)

That is the half everybody knows. And the word doing the work is weightier. He does not say the herb counting was wrong. He says something else was heavier and got left out, which is an argument about rank rather than about validity.

You are allowed to notice that some things weigh more, because He weighed them Himself. Matthew 23:23 uses the word weightier about His own law, and the Holy Spirit is described in John 16:13 as the one who guides into truth, which is a promise about seeing clearly and not about seeing less.

The four words on the end

Here is the rest of the verse.

these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. (Matthew 23:23)

Not to leave the other undone. The other is the mint. The herbs. The smallest, most easily mocked practice in the entire passage.

He could have said the herb counting was a distraction. It would have been the easier sermon and it is the sermon almost everybody preaches from this verse. He said the opposite. Do the weightier things. And also keep doing that.

So the correction is not subtraction. Nothing is removed. What happens is that a rank is restored, and the small thing goes on being done, in its right place, with the right size.

That is the answer to the slope, and it is why the slope is not actually necessary. Naming a rank is not the beginning of throwing things away. It is the opposite motion: it is what stops a person from having to choose between the small thing and the heavy one, because he was never being asked to choose.

You have not started down a slope by asking which is heavier. Matthew 23:23 finishes by refusing to drop the small practice, and it is the same Spirit, 2 Timothy 1:7, who is described as a spirit of a sound mind rather than of fear.

Micah had already named the heavy things

The three Jesus lists, judgment and mercy and faith, are not new, and He is not inventing a shortlist on the spot.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:8)

He hath shewed thee. Past tense. Already done. And what doth the LORD require, which is the exact question a young person is trying to ask when everybody hears rebellion in it.

The verse is not saying nothing else exists. Micah lived under the whole law and kept it. What it says is that if you want to know what the LORD requires, the answer has been shown, in words, plainly, and it is short enough to remember in the car.

And I would point out what the third item is. Walk humbly with thy God. The heaviest of the three is a posture toward a Person, not a practice you can be inspected on. That ordering is doing something.

You have been shown what is required, and it was never kept from you. Micah 6:8 says He hath shewed thee, and it is His Spirit, 1 Corinthians 2:12, who is given specifically that we might know the things freely given, which includes knowing what He asks.

Luke tells the same story and changes one word

There is a second version of this rebuke in Luke, and the word swap is worth the whole trip.

But woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God: and these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. (Luke 11:42)

Where Matthew has judgment, mercy and faith, Luke has judgment and the love of God.

Which tells you what the heavy category actually is. It is not a list of harder duties. It is the relationship itself. The thing that got passed over, in a life of scrupulous herb counting, was loving God, and it got passed over precisely because the herb counting was going so well that nobody thought to check.

That is not a warning against being careful. It is a warning about what carefulness can quietly substitute for, and it lands on me as much as on anybody who ever taught me.

You are not being asked for less care, you are being handed back the thing the care was for. Luke 11:42 names the love of God as what got passed over, and the Holy Spirit is the one, Romans 5:5, by whom that love is shed abroad in a heart rather than manufactured in one.

A lamp is for a path, and a path goes somewhere

The picture Scripture gives for how the word functions is worth holding onto, because it is not the picture most of us grew up with.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. (Psalm 119:105)

A lamp is not a fence. It does not stop you; it shows you. And the man who wrote that psalm was the most enthusiastic keeper of commandments in the whole Bible, which means this is not a low view of rules, it is the view of somebody who loved them.

What a lamp does is let you see where the ground is. That is exactly what a young person is asking for when he asks which rule came from God. He is not asking permission to walk off the path. He is asking to be able to see it.

You are asking for light, and light is what the word was given to be. Psalm 119:105 calls it a lamp and a light, and the Spirit of truth, John 16:13, is named as the one who guides rather than as one who leaves a person in the dark and calls it humility.