The commentary on the Gospel by Fr Luigi Maria Epicoco: Mk 7, 1-13

If for a moment we managed not to read the Gospel in a moralistic way, perhaps we would be able to intuit an immense lesson hidden in today's story: “Then the Pharisees and some of the scribes from Jerusalem gathered around him. Having seen that some of his disciples ate food with unclean, that is, unwashed hands (...) those Pharisees and scribes asked him: "Why do your disciples not behave according to the tradition of the ancients, but take food with unclean hands?" ".

It is inevitable to immediately take the side of Jesus by reading about this way of doing, but before starting a harmful antipathy towards the scribes and Pharisees, we should realize that what Jesus reproaches them is not being scribes and Pharisees, but the temptation to have a religious approach to faith only. When I speak of a "purely religious approach" I am referring to a sort of characteristic common to all men, in which the psychological elements are symbolized and expressed through ritual and sacred languages, precisely religious. But faith doesn't exactly coincide with religion. Faith is greater than religion and religiosity.

That is, it does not serve to manage, as the purely religious approach does, the psychological conflicts that we carry within us, but it does serve a decisive encounter with a God who is a person and not simply moral or doctrine. The clear discomfort that these scribes and Pharisees experience emerges from the relationship they have with dirt, with impurity. For them it becomes sacred a purification that has to do with dirty hands, but they think they can exorcise through this type of practice all the waste that a person accumulates in his heart. In fact, it is easier to wash your hands than to convert. Jesus wants to tell them exactly this: religiosity is not needed if it is a way of never experiencing faith, that is, of what matters. It's just a form of hypocrisy disguised as a sacred. AUTHOR: Don Luigi Maria Epicoco