In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. Mark 7:19
Jesus is dealing with some serious heart issues and the takeaway that Mark leaves us with is that we can eat whatever we want to eat.
In my imagination, the disciples are just outside of the home of one of the local gentiles and they can hear the bacon sizzling in the pan. They’ve been trying their best to listen to what Jesus is saying but that wonderful smell of bacon is in the air. For years they’ve wondered why they’ve been denied even a taste of bacon. The gentiles have been eating it but doesn’t seem to have hurt them. Has it?
And now they just heard Jesus say that it’s alright to eat …..
Maybe this was what Jesus meant when he said you can’t live on bread alone…… Slice up that bread and make a BLT!
(Sorry my imagination has run away with me…..)
I think that many of us are just like Mark. We are spending far too much time thinking about what we should or shouldn’t be eating and we are missing out on what Jesus is really saying to us.
Mark 7:14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”
17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? 19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)
