The Bible Says
Mark 7:14-16 Meaning

The parallel Gospel account for Mark 7:14-16 is found in Matthew 15:10-11.

In Mark 7:14-16, Jesus teaches the crowd that nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them, but rather it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.

The Pharisees and scribes had publicly accused Jesus’s disciples of being defiled and, by implication, questioned Jesus’s moral authority, since His followers broke the tradition of the elders by eating bread without first sufficiently washing their hands (Mark 7:5).

In His response, Jesus exposed them as hypocrites because they had elevated their Mishnah laws-i.e. the oral tradition of the elders-above the Law of Moses. And they use their man-made laws to fabricate loopholes around the Mosaic Law. Thus, their tradition is used to invalidate the word of God (Mark 7:13). Jesus successfully turned around their trap to brand Him as a fraudulent Rabbi who breaks tradition upon themselves by exposing how they break the Laws of God.

Nevertheless, even though Jesus had escaped their trap and rebuked the Pharisees and scribes as corrupt moral teachers, He had left their accusation unrefuted.

Mark 7:14-16 concludes this public interaction as Jesus returned His attention to the crowd to teach them an important lesson.

After He called the crowd to Him again… (v 14a).

The preposition-after-refers to the intense exchange of Mark 7:1-13 between Jesus and the Pharisees. Once that had ended, Jesus called the crowd, who apparently witnessed and heard the entire exchange, to Him again. He was ready to directly address the accusation they had made against His disciples and His ministry as a Rabbi.

Once again, the Pharisees and scribes’ accusation was that Jesus’s disciples defiled themselves since they broke the tradition of the elders by eating bread without first washing their hands.

Jesus will address this accusation to the crowd with a straightforward teaching. And He will sandwich this teaching with a call for His audience to listen and understand/hear what it means.

Jesus uses a simple chiasm to make His point.

A chiasm is a poetic pattern of statements or ideas whose arrangement resembles the left half of the form of the Greek letter "Chi" which looks like the English letter "X." Chiasms are a mirrored pattern that follow an A-B-C…C'-B'-A' format. The main point of chiasms is located in their center so that as they narrow, chiasms get closer in proximity to their most important statement, before they unwind. Chiasms are found throughout scripture. They were a common form which Jews used to express their thoughts.

Here are Jesus’s statements from Mark 7:14-16 arranged in a chiastic outline:

   A.   “Listen to Me, all of you, and understand: (v 14c)

      B   There is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him; (v 15a)

      B’.  But the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man. (v 15b)

   A’. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.” (v 16)

The main point of Jesus’s teaching are the two mirrored statements in the center of the chiasm:

There is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him;

But the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man.

Now that we have seen the chiastic structure of Jesus’s message, we will now consider each statement within it, as He refuted the Pharisees’ accusation that His disciples were unclean because they did not wash their hands before eating bread.

He began saying to them, “Listen to Me, all of you, and understand (v 14b).

Jesus began by calling all of His audience (all of you) to listen and pay close attention to what He was about to be saying to them. They would need to attentively listen if they were to understand.

In the context of this passage, this was Jesus’s way of getting everyone’s attention to publicly clear Himself of the Pharisees and scribes’ slander.

Jesus then directly addressed the heart of the issue.

“There is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him; but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man.” (v 15)

Jesus’s point which He later explains to His disciples in Mark 7:17-23 is that it is not what a person eats or what goes into his stomach that makes him righteous or unrighteous, but rather it is what proceeds out from his heart-the things he dwells upon, says, or does that make him righteous or unrighteous.

There are two parts to this teaching.

The first part of Jesus’s teaching is: there is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him.

This statement declares that the Pharisees and their tradition is wrong. They believed that a person was morally defiled and unrighteous if he ate with unwashed hands. But as Jesus pointed out they are mistaken in this belief for there is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him.

The second part of Jesus’s teaching is: but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man.

Here Jesus declares what does makes a person righteous or unrighteous. It is what proceeds out of that person’s heart. This corrects the error the religious experts were using to condemn Jesus’s disciples.

Once again, it is not external factors like physical impurity or food that renders a person sinful, or impure, or unclean before God. Instead, it is a person’s speech and actions that defile him. It is not what he consumes, but what comes from his heart within, that brings condemnation.

This thought is explained further in Jesus’s teaching from Luke 6:45:

“The good person out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil person out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart.”
(Luke 6:45)

Once Jesus told the crowds (in Mark) about what did not and what did make a man unclean, Jesus called upon the crowd to hear and understand what He was telling them.

If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear (v 16).

This was a common refrain Jesus used for several of His public teachings.

Jesus was urging the crowds to use their ears and their minds to hear what He was teaching them. They were to listen and think about what He said, if they were to really hear and understand His teaching.

In the next section (Mark 7:17-23), the disciples will ask Jesus to explain the meaning of this teaching.