Mark 7:10-23

¹⁰Moses said, "Respect your father and mother,'' and, "Anyone denouncing father or mother should be killed.''d

¹¹But you weasel out of that by saying that it''s perfectly acceptable to say to father or mother, "Gift! What I owed you I''ve given as a gift to God,''

¹²thus relieving yourselves of obligation to father or mother.

¹³You scratch out God''s Word and scrawl a whim in its place. You do a lot of things like this."e

¹⁴Jesus called the crowd together again and said, "Listen now, all of you--take this to heart.

¹⁵It''s not what you swallow that pollutes your life; it''s what you vomit--that''s the real pollution."f

¹⁶

¹⁷When he was back home after being with the crowd, his disciples said, "We don''t get it. Put it in plain language."

¹⁸Jesus said, "Are you being willfully stupid? Don''t you see that what you swallow can''t contaminate you?

¹⁹It doesn''t enter your heart but your stomach, works its way through the intestines, and is finally flushed." (That took care of dietary quibbling; Jesus was saying that all foods are fit to eat.)

²⁰He went on: "It''s what comes out of a person that pollutes:g

²¹obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries,h

²²greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness--

²³all these are vomit from the heart. There is the source of your pollution." [JC]