Just as lightning-bolts, when they shatter rocks, mountains, trees, and the very rooftops of houses with terrible collision, seize upon the senses and minds of men: so the Lord, whenever He thunders against the Pharisees, corrects and amends His own people with a salutary fear, as today's Gospel word has fully taught, that the Pharisees and Scribes reproached certain of the Lord's disciples because they ate with unwashed hands. Let no one, when he hears this, suppose that the Lord's disciples, under the appearance of contempt, ate with uncultivated and filthy hands, and observed and kept no decorum of the Lord's table nor of common fellowship:
since neither does nature permit this, nor does the affection of hospitality admit it. Who would not offer water to the hands at once for the service of one arriving—he who at once refuses to offer sorrow? especially since the Lord Himself, when invited to a meal, rebukes Simon? 'Thou gavest Me no water for My feet,' He says (Luke 7). He therefore wills that to be done which He teaches ought to be required. But the Pharisees were not inquiring after bodily cleanliness in the Lord's disciples, but after the ablutions of their own superstition; not knowing the one baptism which the Lord had provided, not for washing only, but for renewing souls and bodies; which cleansed not the body for the cultivation of life, but the conscience unto salvation. This the prophet prayed for when he said: 'Wash me yet more from my iniquity' (Ps. 51).
That is: How long dost thou wash me legally, yet dost not wash me? Wash me once by grace—me whom the countless washings of the Law have not washed. But let the very Gospel word that follows open this to us: 'The Pharisees,' it says, 'and all the Jews, unless they wash their hands often, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders; and when they come from the market, unless they be baptized, they eat not, observing the baptizing of cups and pots and vessels of brass and of couches' (Mark 7). O Pharisee, who believest thyself clean, when all thy things are polluted by thine own banquet?
In the market thou didst dispute over an innocent man's blood, thou didst plot to seize the substance of the poor, thou didst devise how thou mightest sell freedom into slavery; and when thine inward parts are so defiled by such great crime, how shall the outward water suffice to wash and cleanse thee? This water shall be able to cleanse our hearts and bodies when it too has been purified by the communion of the Holy Spirit, so that by a visible ministry it may accomplish the invisible sacrament of our purification. But thou, O Jew, baptizest cups, pots, and brazen vessels, which, lacking motion and sense by nature, as they know no guilt, so they feel none; these thou honorest, and thou dost not cleanse thyself, by whom all things have been contaminated;
these things, made subject to thy uses and thy services, thou purifiest, and thyself, made subject to divine offices and divine ministries, thou dost not purify. But let us, brethren, hear not what the Lord answered to the Jews, but what He answered to His own disciples: 'And He said, that the things which come out of a man, those defile the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemies, pride, foolishness: all these evils proceed from within, and defile the man.'
What expanses of lands, what greatness of cities, what breadth of regions is strong enough to bear so many foes, to hold so many enemies, to sustain so many nations, as are the vices, the sins, the crimes that plunder the human senses and that the hearts of men suffer? You have seen, brethren, how against a single sheep whole kinds, the whole savagery of beasts rush in, which rage the more the less they can sate themselves; the ravagers cannot be satisfied by the seizing of a single prey with their devouring tooth, and boil and waste away the more from this—that they cannot seize and devour; how against a single dove so many kites, so many eagles, so many ravenous vultures, so great a throng of foul birds runs together. This numerousness, this multitude the prophet had perceived when he sang:
'Evils without number have compassed me about; my iniquities have taken hold upon me, and I was not able to see' (Ps. 40). 'From within, out of the heart of men, they proceed.' Tolerable is the enemy when he batters the walls from without, when, placed outside, he sometimes yields in the conflict; but he who has the enemy within, whose adversary already rages in the very inmost chambers—he perceives and feels himself oppressed, he sees himself even as a captive and bewails it, he cannot be his own conqueror, he cannot be his own deliverer, he seeks help from another, he looks for another defender. 'From within they come out of the heart.' This is a new order of warfare: from a man against a man the nations come out to wage war, not content to conquer in secret, to lay low in hiding;
as though they seek fame from a man's ruin. Let the Jews, who are without, wash themselves and their things outwardly; but let us, brethren, be cleansed inwardly from these filths of vices: let us conquer these nations of wickedness in our minds, with Christ fighting for us; let us drive off these beasts of sin from our hearts by the terror of the Lord's name; let us mightily repel these madnesses of crime and these most ravenous birds from our senses with the spear of the cross; so that the splendor of our city, the sanctity of our temple, the whole and singular adornment of our house may provoke and invite our Author to dwell forever in us. Thither the vices cannot return, where Christ abides with His powers.