Please read the Scripture passage before the homily.
I once met a man from China who had come to the United States as a teenage with his parents . He refused to eat with a fork and spoon because he considered them barbaric. One day he came to understand that both chopsticks and forks served the same purpose, that of bringing food from the plate to the mouth. That is how he came to understand and use forks and spoons.
Imagine the person next to you eating grasshoppers and other insects, sometimes even chocolate coated. How gross to some of us, but there are people who consider these things delicacies. Imagine the horror of sitting next to a person eating ham and eggs when you have grown up to consider ham and pork as unclean and unsanitary.
Situations like these were part of community life in the time Mark was writing his gospel. So, when he recounted the question of Jesus and unclean foods, he added a note for his community that Jesus was declaring all foods clean. The Christians of his community should give up food fights.
If Jesus had said this in his lifetime, he would have caused much confusion because he would have seemed to have thrown out the entire culture of the day. That he did not is evident from the rest of this passage. His list of things that defile agrees quite well with the lists used by moral teachings of others of his time. He was not alone in stressing that defilement comes from the heart, not from the food we eat.
In our day, we live in similar circumstances. We need to look to our hearts, to the decisions we make rather than the externals we see. We have words in our language that we consider to be defiling, and actions that we consider bad or reprehensible, whereas both the language we hear and the actions we experience may come from innocent hearts at peace with self and the world.
We must not judge in our favor.