Read Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 with your family. Do you know what ‘defile’ means? It means to make you dirty in your feelings and your thoughts.

Jesus, his disciples and the Pharisee were all Hebrew people, and Hebrew culture had a lot of rules around food. Many Jewish folks today still follow them. They can’t eat cheeseburgers because dairy and meat have to be separate meals. They can’t eat anything with pork in it, or lobsters and clams, but the can eat beef, chicken and salmon.

Hebrew people took these rules very seriously, so for Jesus’ followers, who were all Hebrew at the time, to NOT follow the food rules, was a really big deal.

However, Jesus turned it around and said it wasn’t what we put into our body that made us dirty, it was the mean and selfish thought, words and actions we use that show were are dirty inside.