Faculty evaluations of students at the seminary has to be one of the most difficult tasks on earth.  How can you tell the inner working of the heart?  How could you tell if this student was a good candidate for the priesthood; that his heart was in the right place, that his love for Jesus and the church was sincere enough and deep enough to last a lifetime?  Step back from that – how can any of us tell that this person we’re in relationship with is ‘the real McCoy” –the genuine article?  Though the centuries, I think, two strategies have emerged to help us. 

      The first is the “outside in” strategy.  It goes something like this:  Train and guide the inner character of a person by enforcing good behaviors that can be seen and measured.  And after these good patterns have been established long enough, the person’s inner character will naturally be shaped for the good.   Does this student attend mass and morning/evening prayer regularly?  Are they diligent in their studies?  Are they actively involved in ‘helping others, serving and loving other people in practical ways?’  If the exterior behaviors are in place, then we can presume that the interior attitudes are also there.  (Parents do this all the time – we make our kids write those thank you notes to grandma for gifts received.  We make them brush their teeth each night before bed, wear their seat belt, say thank you, etc – trusting that they will grow up to become genuinely careful about their health and automatically good mannered toward others.)

      This “Outside-In” strategy was the methodology of the Jewish people.  In today’s first reading, you heard Moses asking the people rhetorically – “What other nation has laws as good as ours?   Since good behaviors eventually shape good character, Jewish laws were created to regulate and enforce good behaviors.  It was a way to create a whole nation of ‘good people’ – through observance of the external law. 

      The Pharisees took that to an ‘nth degree’, with laws about the purification of cups and jugs and kettles and beds.  If your exterior actions were ‘clean’ so too, would there be interior cleanliness.  But in defining holiness in this way – the observance of externals, the Pharisees were guilty of spiritual profiling.  Judging the heart’s stance before God based only on whether they obeyed external laws.  What Jesus tells us in the gospel is that ritual washings and behaviors do not necessarily ensure a pure soul before God.  (And he also takes them to task, because in so defining holiness this way, the Pharisees kept 1/3 of population outside of the possibility of being holy.  Much of Israel was a desert – with water too sparse to spare on ritual cleanliness.  They knew that, but still insisted on it.) 

      So the other way to discern and shape the human character we might call the “Inside-Out” method.  The best way to know the heart of a person is to know them from the inside - their character, their values, and the stories and narratives that have shaped them.  This method presumes that beyond the masks, beneath the artificial world of titles, possessions and beauty, beyond the reach of human regulation – the true heart of a person resides. 

      It seems that Jesus wants to begin from this place.  “Hear me and understand – nothing that comes from without defiles – but those things that come from within – that is what makes a person unclean.”  In one swift sentence, gone are the prescriptions about washings and ritual purity and cleanliness.  Gone is any notion of spiritual profiling.  Jesus refocused the discussion of purity where it belongs – on the inside.  And in so doing, Jesus calls me/us to a much higher standard – to do much more introspection.  Just because I am not a juvenile delinquent – does not make me a saint…  Rather, only from that deep place of character – of practiced and chosen virtue –over time, do we see who we are and what matters. 

      But the million dollar faculty evaluation question still remains: How do we know?  How do we know, even with our own duplicitous hearts, what our true character is?  Of the truth be told, we may not ever know.  We can only hope to know.  We can see how we react to adversity.  We can listen for the truth, even when it is difficult to hear.  We can hold our own emotions and attitudes to the fire, as much as we are able to discover them, to see what kind of fruit they produce.  Which is what Jesus did in the gospel.  Listen to those words/phrases that Jesus used.  Evil thoughts, un-chastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly?  These are not things that we willingly see when we look in the mirror, are they.  But if they make us wince, then there probably is some washing to do, some cleansing within to do, some work from the inside out to do. 

      It is easy to live outside-in.  To look at the externals and to profile our hearts, for good or bad, based on what we see there.  This week, spend a little time living inside-out. Spend some time profiling your heart based on attitudes and values and character.  For just as we judge the quality of an article of clothing by turning it inside out to examine the stitching, so, too, the human heart.  May we be fearless in our examination…