Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5:8

The Lord says: “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). A person who has achieved purity of heart or single-heartedness, as St. Paul says, will not be compromised by material obsessions. Such a person’s heart will be uncluttered and pure in the pursuit of his or her true treasure: the Lord’s kingdom.

Jesus is the perfect example of “the pure of heart.” The sin against purity of heart that He denounces most loudly is hypocrisy. What Jesus has to say about the Scribes and the Pharisees helps us understand the meaning of this beatitude about purity of heart. His statements all center on the opposition between “from within” and “from without;” between our internal lives and our external lives:

“Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity” (Matthew 23:27-28). Thus it is “from within, out of the heart of man” that impurities arise: “evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murders, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things,” says the Lord, “come from within, and they defile a man” (Mark 7:14-23)

Jesus contrasts the internal impurities or evil things that come out of the heart of man with the old external “impurities” imposed by the Pharisees, such as avoiding certain animals, things, people and places that they considered “unclean.” By his actions, Jesus confronts these old taboos. He eats with sinners, touches lepers, mingles with pagans, and offers them a new internal standard of cleanliness; namely, purity of heart.

The importance of this beatitude for today’s youth cannot be emphasized enough. We are living in a society where reality and virtual reality have merged in today’s media culture, especially in today’s pop culture. Young people are acting out without knowing they are acting; and they are responding to images with as much fervor as they would respond to reality. In Japan, a young man married, or so he thought, his virtual girlfriend on his iphone. How silly can you get?

The call to purity of heart in an invitation to wholeness from within; it is opposed to the tendency which empties a person of his or her true identity from within and reduces the person to a figment of the imagination.

The lost sheep that Jesus sought out; St Mary Magdalene, a former prostitute; St. Matthew, a former tax collector; and St. Paul, a former Pharisee; all responded to His call to become pure of heart and rise above the bondage of material obsessions and the praise of others.

“Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.”

Fr. Hugh Duffy