the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside yourselves you are full of greed and evil. Fools! He who made the outside, also
made the inside. But according to you, by the mere giving of alms everything is made clean.

Reflection

The Pharisees are not actually bad people.
They too want to serve God in the best way that they can.
But in the process, they are careful about all that man
could see of their lives and careless about that which
only God could see. And so, they do all the right things
on the outside and took great pains to do so, yet they never
work on what is important, their hearts. In this gospel,
such pharisaical mindset is in full display. A Pharisee
invites Jesus to his house and is aghast that Jesus does not
observe the required niceties such as the washing of hands
before eating. For sure this is itself not bad. It is actually
practical by assuring hygiene before eating. But there is
something much deeper than the mere concern for
proper hygiene. It is a mindset that takes much energy to
assure outward cleanliness to the detriment of inner
purification. And so Jesus redirects the preoccupation
of the host Pharisee to that which is more essential. These
are things that are invisible to the naked eye but not from
God’s eyes.