Gospel Meditation

Purity isn’t popular at the moment. Or is it? Look at a rack of health magazines or at popular podcasts. You’ll see an infinite ocean of regulations and rituals of diets, intermittent fasting, morning sun rituals, intense juice detox practices, lists of dangerous foods, mental practices, as well as long lists of dos and don’ts for the proper cleaning of clothes, dishes, cars, houses, pets, and children. Like it or not, we long to be pure, clean, and without blemish. 
 This question of purity haunted people in Jesus’ day, too. The Pharisees and scribes (the leading purity authorities of the day) criticize Jesus, asking, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” (Mark 7:5). Jesus responds by saying, “There is nothing outside the person that can defile him if it goes into him; but the things that come out of the person are what defile the person” (Mark 7:15).  What does he mean, and how can it help us be pure?
We’ve probably all heard the somewhat shopworn interpretation that Jesus replaces the ritual, exterior notion of purity with a moral, interior one. Christianity is thus seen as a kind of moral re-tooling, as if religion doesn’t make us pure. Good moral intentions do. But this doesn’t take the rest of Jesus’ ministry seriously enough, nor our obsession with purity. The better reading is that Jesus audaciously offers himself as the ultimate source of human purity — from within each human heart. Both our religious ritual practices and our moral actions are meant to flow from this encounter with Jesus the Lord. When we are in friendship with him, everything becomes pure for us. — Father John Muir ©LPi