Daily Mass Gospel Reflection - Hard Hearts

Word on Fire Ministry ^ | 02.09.22 | Aux. Bishop R. Barron

[MurphsLaw]

Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Mark 7:14-23

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus explains that sinful behavior flows from within our hearts. How often the Bible speaks of the “heart.”
By that it means the core of the self, the deepest center of who we are, that place from which our thoughts and actions arise. God wants to penetrate that heart so that he is the center of our souls.

But there is something terribly black in the human heart. We are made in the image and likeness of God, but that image can be so distorted by sin as to be barely recognizable.
Our faith clearly teaches the awful truth of the fall, and we see the evidence of it in the mystery of sin, which is not to be ignored, not to be trifled with, not to be rationalized away. We are all capable of dark and evil acts. I’m not okay and neither are you.

Have our hearts become hardened so that God cannot get in? Is there a deep resistance in us to grace?

[MurphsLaw]

+++ Jesus summoned the crowd again
and said to them,
“Hear me, all of you, and understand.
Nothing that enters one from outside
can defile that person;
but the things that come out from
within are what defile.”

When he got home away from the crowd
his disciples questioned him about the parable.
He said to them,
“Are even you likewise without understanding?
Do you not realize that everything
that goes into a person from outside
cannot defile,
since it enters not the heart but
the stomach
and passes out into the latrine?”
(Thus he declared all foods clean.)
“But what comes out of the man, that
is what defiles him.
From within the man, from his heart,
come evil thoughts, unchastity,
theft, murder,
adultery, greed, malice, deceit,
licentiousness, envy, blasphemy,
arrogance, folly.
All these evils come from within and
they defile.”+++

[ebb tide]

Daily Mass Gospel Reflection - Hard Hearts

No heart is harder than Bergoglio's.