11 Feb 26 | Defilement is an Inside Job
Jesus relocates purity from the hands and table to the heart, exposing that the true source of defilement is not what we touch, but what we become.
The Gospel: 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.”
Today’s Focus
Jesus exposes the danger of substituting external religious observance for interior conversion. True holiness is not determined by ritual compliance or visible correctness, but by a heart aligned to God’s will, from which obedience and love must naturally flow.
In the Margins
Jesus’ teaching here is not a dismissal of the Old Covenant as “bad,” nor a celebration of moral subjectivism. It is a decisive clarification of where impurity truly originates, and it prepares the Church to understand holiness as an interior reality that must bear fruit outwardly. It is also a clear declaration that external observance alone, detached from interior conversion, does not constitute holiness. But the human heart has a way of treating external observance as the essence of righteousness. Jesus corrects the logic, showing that the external contact does not reach the place where covenant fidelity is decided.
Jesus makes it clear that the food is just a passthrough. The thoughts and actions one does shows what lives and grows inside. These reveal the interior state of the person before God. We hear many times in the Old Testament that hearts are hardened. In Scripture, a hardened heart signifies resistance to God’s will, not mere emotional numbness. When this happens, many times it is around bad things happening, such as Pharaoh refusing to let the people go. The heart is not emotion in this sense, but intention and desire. Jesus is not denying that bodies matter, rather, making the point that a person can partake in ritual and still be morally corrupt.
Mark uses parenthetical comments many times. Here, Mark says “(thus declared all foods clean)” to emphasize the point for the reader. While it could look like Jesus loosening the laws here, He actually fulfills and intensifies them by relocating the demands to the heart. By making the point that it isn’t an issue of food, Jesus forces the issue to be examined on the matter of a person’s will. It is easy to blame something else for an issue, but Jesus is declaring that the issue comes from within.
Importantly, Jesus does not loosen moral demands. He tightens them. If food does not defile, then the excuse of “external contamination” disappears. The battle is no longer at the table; it is in the will. If we examine the list that Jesus gives, it shows a relationship between what begins as internal dispositions (envy, greed, arrogance, thoughts), but easily turn into negative actions (adultery, theft, murder). The point is made that these internal negative thoughts lead a person to falter and have things come out that are impure, regardless of what that person is eating.
What is amazing is how well the Gospel still fits in with modern life, thousands of years later. This Gospel talks directly to whether we can “do the right thing” enough. We know that we can never do enough of the right thing and that it is through grace and our cooperation with God’s will that anything is possible. This is the danger that is exposed with relativism, when we replace God’s objective will with our personal preference as the measure of right and wrong. In Matthew, Jesus teaches us a prayer in which through praying to God, we say “thy will be done.” This is paramount to what we learn here, we should be acting according to the preference of God, not ourselves.
Our heart must be aligned to God. If it is, our actions would naturally follow. This connects us to when Jesus said that many will claim to have acted in His name, yet He will reject them because their hearts were not aligned with God’s will. It is not the deed alone; it is the intentions of the heart.
Reflection Question
Where might I be relying on outward religious practice or moral correctness while resisting the deeper conversion of heart that God is asking of me?
A Small Invitation
If this reflection helped you, consider sharing it with someone who may be carrying more than they were meant to.