In today’s reading in Mark, out of chapter 7, the Pharisees try to corner Jesus and his disciples about how their eating practices look a lot like defiling behaviors before the law. But Jesus will not let them take him there.

From where does personal defilement come? From what is ingested, or from how it is ingested, or where it is ingested?

No. No, no, no.

“’Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.’

He went on: ‘…For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come— sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.'”

Jesus asserts here that baneful (misguided, erroneous, errant, deviant, malignant, harmful, destructive- however one wants to frame or temper the term) impulses within a person are inborn and self-manufactured.

That seed of defiance in me predates what anyone or anything did to me after I was born, so that I have no imputation or explanation for my wayward spirit.

This is the foundation of all personal responsibility within the Scriptures. I do what I do, because I do it.

My defects do not excuse my disobedience.

My disabilities do not excuse my deviances.

My wounds do not excuse my wantonness.

My shortcomings do not excuse my sins.

“He went on: ‘What comes out of a person is what defiles them.'”

It’s a tough concept to contemplate in this modern world of justifications, equivocations, and relativations. But Jesus didn’t seem to practice mincing words.

And it is that desecrating disposition in each human being that he came to deal with.