Heart as the Center of Morality!

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

1 Kgs 10:1-10; Mk 7:14-23

In the Gospel, Jesus establishes the heart as the epicenter of human morality. 

By reclaiming the importance of the heart, Jesus repudiates the notions that tie morality to the body. 

There are at least two dangers to making the body the locus of human morality. 

At first, by turning the body into the norm of human morality, the Pharisees also constructed notions of profanation and defilement. Based on these constructions, bodies were turned into either touchable or untouchable bodies. It is no exaggeration to say that, following the same logic, Dalit bodies were made untouchable in the Indian context. Also, from time immemorial, women have been enslaved through their bodies. Hence, by challenging the privilege of the body as the moral norm, Jesus also questions destructive dualities like ‘inferiority vs. superiority,’ ‘high-born vs. low-born,’ ‘holy vs. unholy,’ ‘sacred vs. profane,’ and ‘touchable vs. untouchable’ that were founded on the body as the moral norm. Thus, Jesus underlines the problematic orientation. 

Secondly, Jesus condemns the danger such problematic orientations cause to the understanding of true morality. For instance, in the case of adultery, only the physical act was considered sinful as against the lustful thought that led to it. In addition, because women were enslaved through their bodies by the male-dominant society, only women who were caught in adultery were stoned to death, and not the men who participated in it like the consenting women. Jesus corrects this misunderstanding when he says, ‘Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart’ (Mt 5:27). 

In sum, Jesus is against any misinterpretation that removes the centrality of the heart as the moral yardstick. 

In what he does, Jesus recovers the God-intended original idea of the heart being the epicenter of human morality. 

In effect, Jesus is saying, ‘Morality is not physicality.’ Rather, morality is about attitude, perception, bias, prejudice, envy, lust, anger, hatred, and ill will.

Since the body has nothing to do with any of these, Jesus sees the heart as holding the central place of human morality. 

For Jesus, human morality is synonymous with the internal forum (Forum Internum). 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar