Wednesday in the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time, February 9, 2022

Mark 7:14-23

Jesus summoned the crowd again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.”  When he got home away from the crowd his disciples questioned him about the parable. He said to them, “Are even you likewise without understanding? Do you not realize that everything that goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and passes out into the latrine?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) “But what comes out of the man, that is what defiles him. From within the man, from his heart, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.”

The Lord Jesus teaches about purity here.  First, he says what it is not: “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person.”  That is, something from the outside like dirt can only mar a person’s appearance whereas an internal defiling causes damage to the soul and makes it incapable of happiness here and heaven hereafter.  A person may feign happiness, but this is only an appearance.  The defiled soul becomes intensely self-centered, self-absorbed, and is only pleased when it gets its own way, though even that but momentarily.  While this teaching warns us of the effects of inward defilement, it also consoles us about temptation, from which we all suffer: temptation does not defile us as long as we resist it, since it comes to us from “the outside”.

The Apostles did not understand what the Lord was telling them.  The notion that sin could do this to a person, or that a person could do this to himself through sin, was new to them.  Sin had always been understood as an outward act that could be repaired through an outward ritual.  Thus, the Lord spent some time explaining that it while murder was a sin, inward rage against another person was a sin too (cf. Matthew 5, 22).  It isn’t enough to look like a saint; one has to be a saint inside one’s self.  The appearance, at best, only reflects the inward reality.

The Lord lists for us sins that defile a person so that there is no mistaking what they are (according to the Greek): evil thinking or plotting; fornication; theft; adultery; avarice; cunning; deceit; shameful sexual conduct; causing harm to another (“the evil eye”); blasphemy; arrogance, and willful negligence.  We see that three of these refer to sexual behavior: the Lord wants us to understand that deviancy here is a most serious offense against God.  The inward lusts that drive this deviancy have a particular power to destroy a person and to make a travesty of the image and likeness of God to which each human person is created.  But it is not only sexual sins that cause impurity.  All of the sins the Lord mentions so warp a person that that person cannot think of God, or of heaven, or of anything holy without revulsion or ridicule that is both defensive and puerile. 

One way to think of impurity is as an insect or a speck of dust that gets into out eye.  It makes it difficult or impossible to see out of that eye.  We might think that it is the world which has become distorted, but the problem is with us.  And as long as we tolerate the thing in our eye, we cannot see reality as it is.  Spiritual impurity makes it so that we cannot see God or to see that our lives here are for his service.  It becomes all about us.

How necessary it is for us to pray for spiritual purity and to fight off temptations against it.  It can be so easy to slip into, and so difficult for us to crawl away from.  But with our eyes fastened on the Lord and his love for us, nothing vile will fall into our eye.