Jesus teaches the crowd and explains: what makes a person unclean is what comes out of the heart.
Francis, pure of heart and transparent in his aims and intentions, had also included in the Admonitions he wrote a clear guiding appeal to his friars – regarding their conduct.
In the Sources:
«When we live according to the flesh, the devil seeks to rob us of the love of [our Lord] Jesus Christ and of eternal life, and wishes to lose himself along with everyone else in hell; for, through our own fault, we are vile, wretched and opposed to the good, yet ready and willing to do evil, because, as the Lord says in the Gospel: From the heart come evil thoughts, adultery, fornication, murder, theft, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, false testimony, blasphemy, [pride], folly. All these evil things proceed from within the heart of man, and it is these things that defile man.
Now, however, since we have renounced the world, we have nothing else to do but follow the Lord’s will and please Him alone» (FF 57).
In this way he instructed his brothers in the way of purity.
And in Celano’s First Life, regarding his friars:
‘And so they always used to do when they went to him; they did not hide from him even the slightest thought or the involuntary stirrings of the soul, and after having done all that had been commanded of them, they still considered themselves unworthy servants.
And truly, «purity of heart» filled that first group of Blessed Francis’s disciples to such an extent that, whilst knowing how to do things that were useful, holy and righteous, they proved utterly incapable of taking vain pleasure in them.
Then Blessed Francis, drawing his sons close to him with great love, began to reveal to them his plan and what the Lord had revealed to him” (FF 370).
The magnificence of the little ones!
«It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth—that is what defiles a person»
Tuesday, 18th wk. in O.T. year A (Mt 15:1–2, 10–14)
