Gospel of Mark 7:14-23
It is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean
Jesus called the people to him and said, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that goes into a man from outside can make him unclean; it is the things that come out of a man that make him unclean. If anyone has ears to hear, let him listen to this.’
When he had gone back into the house, away from the crowd, his disciples questioned him about the parable. He said to them, ‘Do you not understand either? Can you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot make him unclean, because it does not go into his heart but through his stomach and passes out into the sewer?’ (Thus he pronounced all foods clean.) And he went on, ‘It is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean. For it is from within, from men’s hearts, that evil intentions emerge: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within and make a man unclean.’
It is not often that modern science jumps out at you from a space of two thousand years as in this passage from St Mark’s Gospel (Catholic Missal, Wednesday, 7 February, 2018). Jesus explains to his disciples his repudiation – logos – of the parsimonious rituals of the Pharisees when it came to the cleanliness of food before they are consumed.
As Jesus explains, the ecosystem of the intestinal tract is indeed isolated from the rest of the human body – the ideas of a biological barrier between the microbiology of the exterior (the human microbiota or more specifically the gut microbiota), and the immunologically-protected ecosystem beneath is made clear in this one sentence, and is interpret-able in the light of scientific knowledge in subsequent centuries of scientific discoveries.
The interplay of what is dirty in a physical sense versus what is unclean as a moral – ethos – attribute (from within) is set apart, to define what truly matters in our well-being.