These are what defile a person, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile a person.”
In these verses Jesus fully reveals the true source of human defilement—the heart—and sums up his teaching by contrasting a person’s inner moral condition with outward ritual requirements. He explains that what enters through the mouth passes through the body and cannot defile a person in a spiritual sense, whereas what comes out of the mouth is first born in the heart. Evil thoughts, sexual sins, theft, murder, false testimony, and blasphemy come from within a person, and these are what truly defile someone before God. In this way Jesus shows that sin is not an external thing brought in from outside, but an expression of the heart’s condition through words and deeds. Eating with unwashed hands cannot make a person unacceptable before God, because the real issue is not physical cleanliness but living with sin. With this teaching Jesus strongly opposes the Pharisees, who placed excessive emphasis on ritual and dietary purity but neglected the moral state of the heart. This passage reminds us that true faith is first of all an inner transformation; outward behavior has value only when it flows from a cleansed heart, because God does not judge by outward appearance but looks at the human heart.