Matthew 15:11 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth— Our Lord, addressing the multitude, observed to them, that nothing could be more absurd than the precepts which the Scribes and Pharisee endeavoured to inculcate: anxious about trifles, they neglected the great duties of morality, which are of unchangeable obligation. They shuddered with horror at hands unwashed, but were perfectly easy under the guilt of impure minds; although not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; because, in the sight of God, cleanness and uncleanness are qualities not of the body, but of the mind, which can be polluted by nothing but sin. Our Lord did not at all mean to overthrow the distinction which the law had established between things clean and unclean in the matter of men's food; that distinction, like all the other emblematical institutions of Moses, was wisely appointed, being designed to teach the Israelites how carefully the familiar company and conversation of the wicked is to be avoided: he only affirmed; that in itself no kind of meat can defile the mind, which is the man, though by accident it may: a man may bring guilt upon himself by wilfully eating what is pernicious to his health, or by excess in the quantity of food and liquor; and a Jew might have done it by presumptuously eating what was forbidden by the Mosaic law, which still continued in force; yet inall these instances the pollution would arise from the wickedness of the heart, and be proportionable to it: which is all that our Lord asserts. See Macknight, Doddridge, Calmet.