Heart Matters
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What we say to someone matters. And what we say is what we believe in our hearts.
Then he said, "Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile." - Matthew 15:16-20
It may be hard to imagine the heart as the source of evil. When we say that we speak from the heart, we usually interpret that as something positive. When we put our heart into something, we mean we are committed emotionally to it.
So, to hear that our heart produces evil intentions and that from those intentions come everything that defiles is a bit disturbing. I want to believe that speaking and acting from the heart is a good thing.
But I think I get it.
When I look at crime statistics, I see a pattern when it comes to certain types of violence, those we might call crimes of passion.
According to the National Crime Victimization Survey:
Nearly 15% of women have been injured by an act that could be classified as a crime of passion.
Between 1994-2010, 80% of the victims of intimate violence were women.
Up to 81% of women who become victims are repetitively victimized by the same perpetrator.
The focus is on women when it comes to crimes of domestic violence, but we can easily expand our scope and see that all acts of violence can come from a place inside us that is angry, hurt, abused, hungry, desperate for a fix.
We are emotional beings, driven by passion or reason. We let our hearts rule our heads, and we convince ourselves that we are right in doing so.
Jesus tried to get his disciples to understand this, but even today, we focus on the wrong message. We think this passage is all about eating food that is not Kosher, and we lose the point all together.
If we focus instead on the fact that we can contrive all worts of evil and justify it in our hearts, we can begin to understand what motivates us, what drives us beyond all reason, what makes laws and rules ineffective.
The only antidote to these crimes of passion is to cleanse our hearts, to fill them with love for one another. By this I mean true love, not the love we claim that leads to domestic violence out of jealousy and hatred.
We are a wounded people and we need healing. Let us pray for the healing power of the Spirit to wash over us, rid our hearts of evil, and let only good things flow from our lips.
Or, these things will continue.
More to come...