Catholic Commentary
Private Explanation of the Parable to the Disciples (Part 2)
20These are the things which defile the man; but to eat with unwashed hands doesn’t defile the man.”
Matthew 15:20 concludes Jesus's teaching that moral defilement originates from internal sins of the heart—such as evil thoughts, murder, and theft—rather than external ritual practices. The passage affirms that eating with unwashed hands does not make a person spiritually unclean, rejecting the Pharisaic tradition that treated ceremonial hand-washing as morally significant.
Jesus moves the battleground of holiness from your hands to your heart—ritual purity means nothing if your interior life is corrupt.
Catholic tradition finds in Matthew 15:20 a crucial passage for understanding the relationship between the ceremonial and moral dimensions of the Law, and the nature of sin itself.
On the Moral Law and Ceremonial Law: The Catholic Church has consistently taught that the ceremonial precepts of the Old Law — including purity rites — were abrogated by Christ's coming (CCC 1961–1964; Council of Trent, Session VI). As Thomas Aquinas explains in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, q. 103, a. 3–4), ceremonial laws were ordered to prefigure Christ, and once the reality arrived, the figure ceased to bind. Jesus' declaration here is therefore not a rejection of the Law but its fulfillment: He reveals what the purity laws were always pointing toward — an interior holiness of heart.
On the Nature of Sin: The Catechism teaches that "sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience" (CCC 1849) and that it "has its source in the heart of man" (CCC 1873), citing this very passage's parallel in Mark 7:21. The specific list of sins in verses 19–20 maps closely onto the Ten Commandments — a deliberate Matthean echo showing Jesus as the new Moses, not abolishing but interiorizing the Decalogue.
Church Fathers: St. John Chrysostom (Homilies on Matthew, Homily 52) observes that Jesus does not merely assert a negative (ritual washing is irrelevant) but a positive: the soul is the seat of moral life, and its purification requires not water on the hands but repentance and grace. St. Jerome (Commentary on Matthew) notes that the Pharisees sought to trap Jesus on a legal technicality, and He responded by exposing the deeper question of what holiness truly is.
On Interior Religion: Vatican II's Optatam Totius and the broader renewal of Catholic moral theology after the Council emphasized the primacy of conscience and interior conversion — a theme rooted precisely in texts like this one.
In contemporary Catholic life, Matthew 15:20 confronts a temptation that is as alive today as it was in first-century Galilee: the substitution of religious performance for interior conversion. A Catholic can attend Mass every Sunday, observe every fast, complete every devotional practice — all of which are genuinely good and important — while still nursing contempt, nourishing lust, or harboring dishonesty in the heart. Jesus' verdict here is a piercing diagnostic: the checklist of external observances cannot cleanse what the heart has not surrendered to God.
This verse also speaks to how Catholics receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The Catechism (CCC 1451) insists that contrition — interior sorrow for sin — is the most essential act of the penitent. A confession mechanically performed without genuine interior movement of the will profits little. Practically, this passage invites the daily Ignatian practice of the Examen — a conscious, evening review of the movements of the heart: What thoughts, desires, and impulses arose today? Which of them, left unchecked, would grow into the sins Jesus catalogues? The real battleground of holiness, Jesus teaches, is interior. The hands can wait; start with the heart.
Commentary
Matthew 15:20 functions as the formal thesis statement closing a teaching unit that began in verse 1, when Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem challenged Jesus because His disciples ate without performing the ritual hand-washing prescribed by the "tradition of the elders" (v. 2). Jesus has spent the intervening verses systematically dismantling the premise of their challenge: first by exposing how their own traditions (like Corban) actually nullified the written commandments of God (vv. 3–9), then by delivering a public parable — "it is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man; but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man" (v. 11) — and finally by explaining that parable privately to His disciples (vv. 15–20).
"These are the things which defile the man" — The demonstrative pronoun "these" (Greek: tauta) points directly back to the catalogue of sins enumerated in verses 19–20a: evil thoughts (dialogismoi ponēroi), murders, adulteries, sexual immorality (porneiai), thefts, false witness, and blasphemies. Jesus has traced a precise moral anatomy: wickedness does not enter a person from outside; it erupts outward from within. The Greek word koinoō ("to defile" or "to make common") was the technical term in Jewish purity discourse for rendering someone ritually unfit for worship. Jesus does not abolish the concept of koinōsis — He radicalizes it. The things that truly render a person "common," unfit to stand before God, are the sins of the heart.
"But to eat with unwashed hands doesn't defile the man" — The adversative conjunction de ("but") sets up the essential contrast. Jesus is not condemning hygiene; He is exposing a misplaced theological priority. The Pharisaic hand-washing tradition (nīṭīlat yadayim) was a rabbinic extension of Levitical priestly purity codes (cf. Exodus 30:19–21) applied, in a democratizing but ultimately distorting move, to all Jews at every meal. By the first century it had become a marker of covenantal seriousness. Jesus' verdict is clear and final: this ritual has no moral weight. It cannot make you holy; its absence cannot make you sinful. The emphasis on "the man" (ton anthrōpon) is universal — this teaching applies to all human beings, not merely Jews under the Mosaic code.
Typological and Spiritual Senses: On the allegorical level, the "unwashed hands" of the disciples prefigure the inclusion of the Gentiles — those without ceremonial purification — into the Body of Christ. Matthew immediately follows this passage (vv. 21–28) with the healing of the Syrophoenician woman's daughter, a deliberate editorial placement suggesting that Jesus' teaching about inner purity has universal application: even those outside Israel's ritual system are not defiled before God in the deepest sense. On the moral/tropological level, the passage is an enduring call to examine the interior life. The Fathers consistently read this passage as an invitation to — a turning of the heart — over mere external reform.