Lord, Give Us Pure Hearts

⁵ And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” ⁶  And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,

“‘This people honors me with their lips,
 but their heart is far from me;
⁷  in vain do they worship me,
 teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’

⁸  You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”

⁹  And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! ¹⁰  For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ ¹¹  But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God)^[d] — ¹²  then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, ¹³  thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”

¹⁴ And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: ¹⁵ There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”^[e]

“In Semitic expression the “heart” is the center of human personality which determines man’s entire action and inaction. This key to the statement in verse 15 was already available in the citation of Isa. 29:13: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” Jesus now makes this explicit when he traces the source of defilement to the heart, and shows that in an ultimate sense “food” and “the heart” have nothing to do with each other. The relevance of this explanation to the question posed in verse 5 is apparent: fulfilling the dictates of the oral law on cultic purity does not alter the heart of man with its warring impulses: the minutiae of the tradition are powerless to remove the pollution from the heart, the source of defilement in the actions of men. Jesus has no intention of denying that the purity laws occupy a significant place in the Mosaic code (Lev. 11:1–47; Deut. 14:1–20) or of detracting from the dignity of men who suffered death rather than violate the Law of God governing unclean foods (1 Macc. 1:62 f.). Rather he presses home the recognition that the ultimate seat of purity or defilement before God is the heart.”

“I believe firmly that the moment our hearts are emptied of pride and selfishness and ambition and everything that is contrary to God's law, the Holy Spirit will fill every corner of our hearts. But if we are full of pride and conceit and ambition and the world, there is no room for the Spirit of God. We must be emptied before we can be filled.”