‘And he called to him the crowd again and said to them, “Take notice of me all of you and understand. There is nothing from outside a man that going into him can defile him. But the things that proceed from the man, they are those that defile the man.” '
The crowd had been gathered round listening to the dispute which had been intended to discredit Jesus in front of them. Now Jesus drew them into the conversation. He wanted them to consider the truth for themselves, and it was important to Him that they recognised that He had good grounds for His argument. He stressed that the only thing that really defiled a man in God's eyes was what was inside him and came from him, not what he himself partook of. What He was countering here was the idea that because a man had not ceremonially washed himself (as some of His disciples had failed to do) what he was eating necessarily defiled him. What He wanted to turn attention to was that what men thought and how they behaved morally was more important than what they ate, and that what really mattered was moral rightness, as He explained later to His disciples (Mark 7:18-23).
At first sight this seems to suggest that Jesus is discounting the Old Testament teaching on foods which were ‘unclean'. But nothing was further from His mind. His statement was not intended to deal with that question. It was intended to be general rather than specific. There is no doubt in fact that He did abstain from, and would at this stage have accepted that other Jews should abstain from, ‘unclean' food as described in Leviticus 11. That assisted men to live wholesome lives. But what He had in mind here was the food which some of His disciples had been eating which was not unclean of itself, and was only seen to be so because of Rabbinic rules. He was speaking of an obvious general fact, that it is not what is eaten that makes a man sinful, but what comes from his heart. That what really makes a man unclean is the sin that comes from his inside him. And while it contained the seed of the idea that no food was unclean of itself, that was not what Jesus was intending to indicate here. Such a thought was not explicit. He was rather contending with overbearing requirements which were then claimed to be commandments of God.
Of course, if wrongly applied Jesus words could be criticised. All who heard Him knew that to eat something poisonous would be foolish and could even be fatal. But Jesus' point was that it would not defile him before God, not that it was all right to eat anything.
‘Take notice of me all of you and understand.' He did not want them to go away just thinking they had heard a technical argument. It was an important lesson for them to consider, that they should consider their own hearts.