Under the Law, certain foods were considered clean or unclean; to eat what was unclean was to become unclean. But today Jesus teaches us the real lesson the Law was trying to impart: that what we allow to enter into our hearts and minds has a profound effect on who we become.
We are, in a very real sense, what we “eat,” what we take in and consume.
St. Clare of Assisi illustrates Christ’s point well when she writes, “We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God’s compassionate love for others.”
When it comes to being the light of the world, then, Jesus offers this wisdom: “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be,” (Matthew 6:22-23). When we fix our gaze on what is sinful, what distracts us from God, that is what is within us, and what comes out of us. But if our gaze is focused on Jesus and what is true, good, and beautiful is what occupies our heart, for “A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks,” (Luke 6:45).