You abandon God’s commandments and cling to human traditions.

Today’s Gospel – if listened to carefully, gives us the feeling that perhaps we have misheard or misunderstood, like “the Pharisees and certain scribes who came down from Jerusalem” (Mk 7:1) who came to see Jesus.

If we can rule out the former, we can equally rule out the latter. That is precisely how Jesus meant it. He is not interested in our Sunday suit, our new clothes, the place we occupy in church… Jesus invites us to look not under our case but “under our skin” – into the human heart. Outward appearances can hide a lot; our behavior in public can give others the impression that they have a decent person in front of them, perhaps even a pious one – by their posture. But we don’t even need to look into the human heart; it is enough to see us at home at work, how we behave towards our wives, our children, our colleagues at work, our subordinates. And this is about our heart. Playing nice, one can do for an hour, but not for a lifetime. One puts off the mask to put it on again at the next celebration in everyday life. How many do I have? I have each one for a different occasion…?
We’re easily capable of deceiving people who do not know us, but not God, interested in our hearts. And he sees there better than we do. “From within, out of the human heart, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, lewdness, chastity, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evils come from within man and defile the man.”

We can already see how useless our “masks,” our acting, are. God reveals us perfectly, and let’s face it: it shames us. Jesus invites us today to take the first step – to stop putting on a show for ourselves, to stop deceiving ourselves, and to look inside ourselves with God’s eyes, and only then will we discover the truth about ourselves. God cannot be fooled; let’s not even try. We can tell ourselves anything, and so can others around us. God invites us to the root of the matter, our hearts – first, we must know the truth about ourselves.
And the truth about God and ourselves is not a scientific theology theory but a matter of relationship: God and self. It is a reality. God himself came to tell us this; we have it captured in the four Gospels. In Revelation. Everything we are to do is there. So, why are we still so far from God’s truth? One reason is the intrusion of human elements into the faith. Our subjective interpretations of the words of the Lord Jesus. This is a real danger in our lives and causes great harm to our fellow man and us. This applies not only to priests but to all of us who are capable of twisting even the words of a priest who is explaining the Word of God to us. The dangers of such attitudes need not be mentioned. From Jesus’ words comes anger and sorrow; thus, it is a serious matter.

He warns us against arbitrary explanations of God’s words, against complacency, against arbitrariness, overestimating human elements in religion, in the liturgy. God’s will remains in the background. This is what Jesus wanted to say to his contemporaries and us as well.
He warns us of one more thing: not making religion a purely cultic affair. Jesus himself said that he did not come to abolish the Jewish faith. He came to fulfill it and purify it of dangerous human elements. He accused the Pharisees of their attention to externals. They observed an outward, almost morbidly external ritual, yet many did not know the nature of the exterior act that was supposed to indicate inward purification. Man has not changed, for even today, man makes the same mistakes as he did two thousand years ago. The primary fault of Jesus’ contemporaries was: neglecting God’s warnings through the prophets. Jesus, therefore, does not abolish everything old but, on the contrary, renews this divine demand and takes up the prophetic fervor against the petty and superficial piety that was exhausted in the renunciation of prayer phrases and the outward dispensation of cultic regulations.

Hypocrites” – Jesus uses a curse word. We say to ourselves, so they were evil people, those Pharisees. Let’s not forget, the gospel was not just addressed to first-century Jews, but all generations, including us. Everybody today knows the word Pharisee, Pharisaic. We mean – the action of a person pretending and being insincere. And we use it even today, that is, we know very well that a Pharisee – this is not a man of antiquity, this is the image of man. Hypocrisy is any action that puts man’s actions above God’s law. Hypocrisy was likewise religious zeal, especially in ritual purity, whereby God’s laws were grossly violated.
The highest degree of this hypocrisy was: the direct suppression of God’s commandments by false piety at the expense of the duty of love to one’s neighbor, as if the end sanctified the means.

We all know the story of the merciful Samaritan and the unmerciful priest and Levite who went to serve God in the temple but refused to help the wounded man. Jesus is not making up fairy tales, but he is well aware of the situation around him and raises his finger in warning, “See, this is as far as human willfulness can go.” Therefore, when a certain scribe asks what is the essential part of the Law, Jesus replies, “You are a scribe and do not know this? Thou shalt love God with all thy might…and thy neighbor as thyself.” No wonder the scribe couldn’t figure out the tangle of prohibitions and commands, so the point was lost. Only Jesus points out what is the reason for the cult and religion. It is love. And it doesn’t take a scholarship to do that. We see how this scholarship was a trap for the scribes and Pharisees. Hats off, at least, to those who could ask Jesus what the truth was. It was worse with those who thought they knew everything and didn’t need anyone to advise them. Yes, the real danger is the pride that caused the chosen people to fail to recognize the Truth when it came into the world.
The same thing can happen to us. We may say of Jesus that we are His disciples, but our hearts will be hostile to God Himself because we are making God in our image.

The Lord Jesus antagonized the highest circles in Israel. In the same way, we also become God’s enemies when we commit the mistakes mentioned above. Jesus Himself says this in another place: “It will not help you that you have served me, that you have eaten and drunk with me. Depart, you who practice iniquity” (cf. Lk. 13:26-27).

Every leader is threatened by the temptation of hypocrisy in some form. It is easy to pass off one’s plans and opinions as God’s clear will for all against subordinates. It is inappropriate to facilitate the art of education by pointing to one’s gifts of the Holy Spirit where factual and rational reasons are in place. And it would also be irresponsible and gravely sinful to knowingly substitute human opinions for God’s commandments.

Jesus was a man sought after by simple people, but learned men also gladly debated him – the scribes and Pharisees. However, many things bothered the Pharisees. One of them was that his disciples did not wash their hands before eating. Jesus replies to them, “Isaiah prophesied well of you hypocrites, as it is written: This people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. But in vain do they honor me, for what they teach are the commands of men. You forsake the commandments of God and cling to the traditions of men.”
When Jesus answers the Pharisees’ question with a quotation from Isaiah, it may have initially given the impression that He was rebuking mere superficiality. However, the following verses show that there is a more significant issue at stake: “You are abrogating God’s commandments and clinging to human traditions.” Thus, the real problem is not the washing of hands but the traditions they have created within Judaism – for God’s sake. But why did the Pharisees disturb God’s word with their traditional washing? Because by doing so, they were preventing the evil that makes man incapable of fellowship with God, which comes from the human heart! No food is unclean. Nothing created that man can make a man dirty. Only one’s own heart is capable of alienating man from God.