We all can get very comfortable in our faith, regular in our routines, confident in our beliefs, not really challenged on a day-to-day basis in our Christianity. We know the rituals; we know the doctrines; we're used to the flow of the liturgical year. We can almost sleep-walk through Mass. Then we have a reading like today's Gospel (Mk 7: 14-23) which ought to remind us of the radical nature of what Jesus taught, and of what He expects of His followers. Today Jesus tells the disciples that what you eat doesn't matter from a spiritual perspective. Mark says: "Thus, he declared all foods clean." Think about it-- all the Jewish dietary laws, fundamental to the culture for hundreds of years, go out the window. All foods are clean-- even pork. You have to believe that got folks' attention. You can almost hear the audible gasps even now, 2000 years later. All foods are clean? Really? Why does Jesus make that point, a point which would certainly offend many of His listeners? I think the answer lies in the fundamentally-radical nature of what Jesus demands. Jesus is asking more of His followers than the Jewish law required. It is relatively easy, after all, not to eat a particular kind of food. I know plenty of people who don't eat meat, for example. Not a huge problem. And I suppose not eating pork, if you were Jewish, wasn't a huge problem either. In the same way, while I am sure it took some doing to keep all the rules about how to wash pots and pans and such, and about not mixing certain ingredients and all the rest, in the end these are superficial things that demand very little of us as human beings. They have nothing to do with the interior life. It is in the interior life that Jesus wants to work. It is there that He makes demands. He wants His followers to think less about what they can't eat, and more about who they are as people. If is very easy, after all, to follow a lot of superficial rules of external piety and think that doing so makes us right with God, and right with one another. Not so, Jesus tells us. Not so at all. The difference is illustrated in Jesus' articulation of what we all know as the "Golden Rule." We read the Old Testament version of that rule in today's Morning Prayer reading from the Book of Tobit: "Do to no one what you yourself dislike." (Tobit 4: 15a). Or, as we might say, don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you. That's a negative, like not eating a certain food-- rather easy to follow by just doing nothing. Jesus demands more. He demands that we do unto others what we would want others to do for us. He takes the old law and moves it to a higher plane. He always demands more of us. He demands that we not only avoid doing evil to others-- He demands that we avoid thinking of doing evil to others. To live that way requires profound internal change, which is why Jesus today draws His followers' attention away from their shock at the idea that all foods are clean and towards the idea that it is what is inside that matters. "From within," Jesus says, "from the heart" come all those behaviors that are evil. (Mk 7: 21) Think about that the next time you think being a Christian isn't challenging.