Reading
Mark 7:14-23
14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”
17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? 19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)
20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”
Meditation
By declaring to the crowds that nothing outside a man can contaminate him, Jesus affirms the goodness of creation; relating to it in a disordered way is the cause of sin, which resides precisely inside the heart of man and not outside of him.
Jesus places the Mosaic laws on foods in the context of the kingdom of God, where they are abrogated, and only considers the violation of the Decalogue to be an impurity. By declaring all food pure (v. 19) he attests that everything that comes from God for man's nourishment is good; only the wrong intention can contaminate us and the environment around us.
Using the comparison between the foods that are ingested and then eliminated, without man being contaminated by them, and the feelings that are not expelled because they are rooted in the heart and make it impure, Jesus wants to emphasize that what counts is our inner purity and that our action is valid to the extent that it expresses it.
The bad intentions listed by Jesus can be divided into two groups: the first group includes six vices, the last three of which follow the first three; the reference is to the second table of the Decalogue; the second group comprises six sinful attitudes; we thus have "fornication, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, shamelessness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness" (vv. 21-22).
The accent is placed in a particular way on those sins that hurt the neighbor, against the exasperated attention of the Pharisees for the ritual "purity" towards God. The encounter with Jesus in the sacraments and in His Word cleanses the evil intentions that contaminate our hearts and allows us to restore, with the grace of God, his creative project, where everything is done for the good of man.
Jesus not only re-establishes the truth between what is pure and what is impure - freeing us from our religious obsessions - but also cleans up the accumulation of norms and precepts of the Pharisaic tradition, calling us back to an ecology of the heart, so that the fruits of the gospel may abound in it.
Prayer
Send your Spirit, o Lord, to refine the feelings and intentions of our hearts in his fire, so that we can render you a worship that pleases you. Amen.
- Rev. Dr. Luca Vona
