Do you not realize that everything
that goes into a person from outside cannot defile,
since it enters not the heart but the stomach
and passes out into the latrine?
Even the fruit the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not a problem because of the fruit itself. It was rather what the choice of eating that fruit without God's approval represented, the inherent self-will and disobedience to the Divine will contained in that choice, that was reason that action brought death.
You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden
except the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
From that tree you shall not eat;
the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.
In trying to follow God we find it easier to fixate on externals, on the form of our religion, but sometimes neglect the true power which those externals were meant to express (see Second Timothy 3:5). We begin obeying negative precepts, by not eating this or that, but forget that we are doing so to obey a loving God who has our best interests at heart. From there it is a short move to doubting God's intentions and choosing our own will over and against his own.
If we make the mistake come to see our obedience to God in terms of externals only doubts quickly follow. Yes, he asks us to not eat certain foods. But perhaps it is only because he intends to give them to us later. Perhaps the tree of knowledge of good and evil would have been given to Adam and Eve at a later point when they had grown more. Certainly some of the Church Fathers suggesteded this. Perhaps it was prohibited for them to reach out and take it but so that it could later be given as a gift. Even the food regulations of the Mosaic law could be seen in this way. They were given because to aid the growth of Israel and help it to retain its unique identity as the people of God.
(Thus he declared all foods clean.)
But in Christ the people of God grew out of the adolescent phase and no longer needed to be under a guardian (see Galatians 3:25). They could now receive with thanksgiving those things which had formerly been considered unclean (see First Timothy 4:4).
We have seen that it is appropriate to receive some food at one time and not other, and that different circumstances call for a different response of obedience to God. Does this mean that morality itself changes? Of course not. For love of God and love of neighbor underlie any right expression of obedience. That is why it is always first and foremost a matter of the heart.
But what comes out of the man, that is what defiles him.
From within the man, from his heart,
come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder,
adultery, greed, malice, deceit,
licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.
The sins Jesus listed always and everywhere defile. When we let these thoughts take shape in words and actions we do become defiled. And there are certain intrinsically immoral actions which are always objectively expressions of such evils. Yet if we fall in to the trap of looking only at the externals, objective though they are, we tend to lose the inner logic of goodness. We become unable to sympathize with others who are being defiled by evil, even unable to sympathize with ourselves when we fall. If we are not careful it will not be long before we can no longer take God's commands seriously and reach out for the fruit ourselves.
Jesus, by making everything about the heart, taught us how we could remain faithful and undefiled. He knew that our hearts themselves had become predisposed to prefer bad to good, darkness to light, but he himself had come to give us new hearts.
And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh (see Ezekiel 32:26).
Our first parents decided not to trust God and we've had a hard time trusting him ever since. But if we receive the new heart that Jesus wants to give us we can have our freedom to trust restored. We can come to see past the externals to the providential care of a Father who loves his children.
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