Wednesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time
Jesus speaks to us from today’s Gospel about our hearts. As we approach the beginning of Lent on February 14, today’s text invites us to do some pre-Lenten examination of our hearts. Do we come before him today with purity of heart? Or do our hearts, perhaps, need healing of some vices, stains, and sin that prevent us from loving God more perfectly? Let us bring our hearts before the Lord who knows us better than we know ourselves and ask him to reveal the condition of our hearts.
At the beginning of Mark 7 and leading up to today’s Gospel passage, we find Jesus in a heated discussion with the Pharisees and teachers of the law. These religious leaders harshly criticize Jesus because his disciples had neglected to perform the ritual hand-washing that the ceremonial law required. Christ calls the leaders to account on their misplaced emphasis on ceremonial law to the exclusion of the moral law. Jesus emphatically draws the religious leaders, the crowd, and then also his disciples “back to basics.” Jesus points us beyond a mere “religious” life to the moral life. Jesus calls us deeper into the very heart and life of God.
Specifically, the religious leaders’ beef with Jesus was around ritual uncleanness. Jesus responds, “‘Do you not realize that everything that goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach . . . 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’.” This representative list of thoughts, vices, attitudes, and sinful behavior points to an impure heart. The state of a person’s heart ultimately dictates his posture, attitudes, and actions. We can work at and strive to behave morally and uprightly (to do the “right thing”), but ultimately the state of our hearts dictates who we are and how we consitently react and respond to God, to others, and even to ourselves. We can only “fake it” for so long, or at certain times, if our heart isn’t right.
Conversely, the same is true! A heart surrendered to God, receptive and eager to receive and extend God’s love, committed to being perfected in love, humble and contrite, soft and pliable, hungry for God’s Word – that heart drives a person to love and live the moral law, that heart is evident to all because holiness and love radiate from it, even however imperfectly.
I don’t believe a person can authentically and consistently behave in ways that are incongruent with the state of the heart and the relative formation of both heart and conscience. We can verbalize our ascent to God’s truth and teaching, and discipline ourselves to try to live it, but ultimately our internal drivers are the heart and the conscience. One’s overall character and patterns of behavior are shaped by those innermost parts and the extent to which the person remains open to transformation by the power and love of God. Ultimately, a person will consistently think and act in conformity to who they are in their innermost being. Our Gospel, I suggest, invites each of us to consider our thought patterns and behavior related to the state of our hearts.
How about you; how about me? We might ask ourselves, how is the condition of my heart right now? From what might I need to be purified? What virtues do I seek to nurture and cultivate? Let us take some time today, and in the coming days as we prepare for Lent, to invite the Lord to examine us and to reveal to us what we need to know about ourselves so that our hearts might become more pure and holy. Thank you, God, for your vast mercy toward us! Amen!
-Elizabeth Wells