Fr Paul Gooley reads today’s Gospel from Mark (7:14-23) in which Jesus says, ‘Nothing that goes into a person from outside can make them unclean; it is the things that come from inside a person that make them unclean’.
Fr Paul says today’s Gospel follows on from yesterday dealing with the issue of clean and unclean. In this passage, he says, Jesus sweeps away all the legal restrictions on food. Many of these restrictions are featured in the written Mosaic legislation and are founded on ancient ideas of hygiene. They constituted – and still do – an important feature of Jewish life, with the important practical consequence that Jewish and gentile Christians could not share a meal.
It is a sign of Jesus’ sovereign and divine authority that he feels able to cancel all these regulations, just as he cancels the absolute priority of the Sabbath, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’ (2.28).
The Law comes from God, and only God may alter it. Jesus replaces them with a list of human deviations which spring from the human heart, thus indicating the basic springs of Christian morality. He changes the basis of morality from being objective to being subjective.
In closing Fr Paul invites us to consider today’s Gospel Question…What is in me, what is in my heart, that needs to be made clean?
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