Jesus said, “What goes into you from outside can’t make you unclean. What makes you unclean is what comes out from inside.” Mark 7:15

Some of the most famous martyr stories in Jesus’ world were about Jewish people who had been tortured and killed for refusing to eat unclean food, particularly pork. That’s why Jesus had to use parables. It was the only way he could say some of the most devastating things he wanted to say.

Jesus expected his disciples to get the point, but they are slow on the uptake. Only when they get back in the house does Jesus explain. He hadn’t been talking about food that goes in the stomach; he’s talking about what comes out of the heart (the real need of humans for a deeper purity of motive). Even though we know that the actual heart pumps blood, not motivations, most cultures talk about motives coming from the heart.

Jesus insists that good and bad external and physical actions come from internal and spiritual sources, and that human motivation is the real problem.

Interestingly, Jesus says nothing at this stage about his proposed cure for the disease he has diagnosed. We are left to infer it. As in a later passage, [Mark 10:5 (ESV) 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment.] the assumption Mark clearly wants us to make is this: Jesus is offering a cure for the problems of the heart, for the springs of motivation that result in wicked thoughts and deeds. He doesn’t only show us what’s wrong but he also hints at a solution.

The Kingdom of God is the solution. The Jews in the Middle East had for centuries been surrounded and infiltrated by paganism, both as cultural force and as military might. What more natural than to reinforce the purity codes which said, “We are Jews! We are different! We don’t live like you do!”

However, what Jesus suggests is that the kingdom of God meant throwing open the doors of God’s people to anyone and everyone who would repent and believe. Mark’s little comment [“Thus he declared all foods clean.” Mk 7:19b] is his little comment to his own Christian community. The old Jewish laws about clean and unclean foods, laws which divided Jew from Gentile even though they were in theory now one in Christian faith, were irrelevant. Jesus’ basic point is that purity laws, including food laws, don’t actually touch the real human problem, and that that is what the kingdom of God addresses. Jesus brought the old scriptures, the whole covenant with Israel, to a new completion, a new fulfilment.

The scriptures spoke of purity, and set up codes as a signpost to it; Jesus was offering the reality. When we arrive at the destination, we don’t need the signposts any more, not because they were worthless but precisely because they were correct. The starting point is to realize that the Jewish scriptures aren’t to be seen as a timeless code of behavior, but as the story which leads to Jesus. The deeper truths to which they pointed has now arrived.