What Comes Out of a Person

The argument starts over hand-washing. Some Pharisees and teachers of the law have come from Jerusalem, and they notice that Jesus's disciples eat with hands that have not been ceremonially washed. Mark, writing for readers unfamiliar with the custom, explains that the Pharisees and all the Jews washed in a particular way before eating, along with cups and pitchers and kettles, holding to the tradition of the elders. This was not hygiene. It was a fence around holiness, an extra layer of rule built to keep people well clear of breaking the actual law.

Jesus does not defend the disciples' manners. He attacks the fence. You have let go of the commands of God, he says, and are holding on to human traditions. Then he gives an example so sharp it must have stung. The law says honor your father and mother. But a man could declare his property Corban, devoted to God, and thereby excuse himself from using it to support his aging parents. A religious vow had become a way to break a commandment. Tradition had nullified the word of God.

Then he turns to the crowd and says the thing that reorganizes everything. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going in. What defiles is what comes out. Later, in the house, he spells it out for the disciples: food goes into the stomach, not the heart. But from the heart come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. Mark adds a parenthesis that must have seemed astonishing when he wrote it: in saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.

The one idea is this. Religion tends to move the problem outward, where it can be managed with washing and rules and vows. Jesus moves it back inward, where only he can deal with it. That is not comfortable. A dirty hand can be washed before dinner. A heart that produces envy and slander cannot be. It can only be changed.

So the turn toward life is not a resolution to try harder at the outside. It is to bring the inside to him. Notice what actually comes out of you this week: the words in traffic, the thoughts about the coworker, the small deceits that smooth a day. Do not wash your hands over them. Take them to the one who declared foods clean and who alone can make a heart clean. That is what the whole passage was for.