From The Inside Out
It’s not food that makes us unclean but the filth that overflows from our own hearts.
7:14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”
Jesus gathers the crowd and drops what may have been the most radical thing his listeners had ever heard: “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.” In one stroke, he undercuts centuries of Jewish practice surrounding food. For a people who had been raised on Leviticus, kosher laws were not just dietary quirks—they were badges of holiness, identity markers of God’s people. And Jesus sweeps them aside with a single sentence. No wonder the disciples couldn’t grasp it. This was less a tweak to tradition than a nuclear bomb on their entire framework of clean and unclean.
17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? 19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)
Later, away from the crowd, the disciples press him. “So… you’re saying bacon is back on the menu?” They’re baffled. After all, the Scriptures themselves had outlined what foods were clean and unclean. Was Jesus going against the Scriptures? The answer is complicated: yes and no. Yes, in the sense that he is undoing the old categories. But no, in the sense that he is fulfilling their purpose.
The food laws of Leviticus were never about the food. They were about developing a practice—training wheels to teach Israel that God is holy and they are called to be set apart. But now the training wheels come off. Jesus, the Word from the beginning, knows what the laws were aiming at all along. And he reveals the deeper truth: uncleanness isn’t about what you eat, but about what you produce—your words, your deeds, the overflow of your heart.
20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”
Jesus then hands them a different list of “unclean things.” Not pork or shellfish, but what spills out of human hearts: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lust, envy, slander, arrogance, and foolishness. These, he says, are the real defilers.
The Pharisees fuss about washed hands, but Jesus insists the real dirt is not under your fingernails—it’s under your ribs. The problem isn’t what goes into the stomach; it’s what comes out of the heart. If you want to be clean, forget the soap and the kosher checklists. Start by cleaning the wellspring of your words and actions. That’s the uncleanness God cares about.
Reflection Question
What darkness has been “coming out” of you lately—and what might it be saying about what’s happening within?
