If a boy receives circumcision on the Sabbath, that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me, because I made a man completely healthy on the Sabbath?
Circumcision: the outward cutting of the flesh taken as the whole work, the external rite trusted in place of the inward rising of the anointing
Esoteric lens · Galatians 5:2
but he is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit not in the letter; whose praise is not from men, but from God.
Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God.
He gave him the covenant of circumcision. So Abraham became the father of Isaac, and circumcised him the eighth day. Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Jacob became the father of the twelve patriarchs.
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The mind under the ego will defend a small ceremony and rage against a whole healing, straining at the form while the substance escapes it. It permits the cutting that keeps a rule and condemns the mending that makes a man complete, because the ego prefers a partial gesture it can control to a wholeness it cannot claim as its own.
Anger at the one who heals is fear of what healing means, for if a mind can be made entirely whole, then the whole system of measured merit falls away. What offends the ego is not that a law was bent but that love asked nothing and gave everything, and this is the very generosity the fearful mind cannot forgive.
The true seeker is defined by an inward condition, not by a mark on the body or a name on a roll. Circumcision cut in the flesh only stands for the real work, which is a cutting-away in the heart, the stripping of excess desire from the deep center of feeling. To do it in the spirit and not the letter is to change the actual current of the inner life rather than to keep an outer rule. The praise that comes from other men measures the surface; the recognition that comes from within, from the divine seated in a person, answers only to what has genuinely been pared away.
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