Reflection -- How Do We Clean The Heart ?

“Why do your disciples eat ritually unclean food?” demand the Pharisees and scribes of Jesus in today’s text.  Jesus counters by quoting Isaiah 29:13: “You honor me with your words, but your hearts are far from me.”  Then Jesus pronounces: “You’re obsessed with your own laws and have abrogated God’s law.  Listen, what makes a person unclean is not by ingesting unclean things but by emitting the evil things in one’s heart: theft, envy, slander, pride, and more.”

The gospel text suggests that we be faithful in the practice of living the faith we proclaim.  We are called to look into the hidden crevices of our hearts where our wishes live, where our motives are born.  We make ourselves impure, unworthy, not by what we take into ourselves but by what we draw out of our minds and hearts.

Jesus is telling all who listen that God is honored by covenant keeping of the heart more than by performance of rituals.  We are being called, just as Jesus was calling those who heard him over 2,000 years ago, to move beyond legalism to focus on our call as disciples to right relationships.

We do this by first remembering that human traditions and rituals can not replace the commandment, the will of God.  Second, we must remember that it is what comes out in the way we relate toward others that determines whether we are pure or impure.  As Paul states in Galatians 5:6, “The only thing that counts is faith working through love.”

The Pharisees believed that the relationship with God and the world was mediated by the Torah, understood as a structure that ordered all of life in terms of holiness. For the follower of Jesus, the relationship with God and the world is mediated by Jesus, whose desire to heal and to save acknowledges no boundaries.

Because of our human nature, we all get fixated on one thing or another, especially when we are evaluating people or things that affect us.  We find ourselves judging our neighbor, be it on how noisy they are or how well they keep their yard or how mannerly their children are.  We also judge fellow Christians on how often we see them volunteering or how early or late they come to church, or if they dress to our standards in church.  What this does is cause us not to see into our own heart.  The love or hate we show is rooted there and can only be changed from the inside.

Maw Barker

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Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around [Jesus], they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.  (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.)  So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" 

He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.'  You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile."

For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.  All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."  [NRSV]