Acts 10:28 · World English Bible
He said to them, “You yourselves know how it is an unlawful thing for a man who is a Jew to join himself or come to one of another nation, but God has shown me that I shouldn’t call any man unholy or unclean.
Every group carries parts it cannot accept: its greed, its hunger, its mess. Instead of facing them, it hands them to the outsider.
From the Psychoanalysis reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Every group carries parts it cannot accept: its greed, its hunger, its mess. Instead of facing them, it hands them to the outsider. The foreigner, who eats and prays differently, becomes the dirty one. Calling him unclean is easier than seeing the same thing at home.
The man in the story is shown that this line was never real. What looked like dirt in the stranger was his own rejected side, placed onto another face. Once he admits those things live in him too, the stranger stops being unclean, and he can meet him as an equal.
Psychoanalysis lens
What do you dislike most in other people, and where does the same thing live in you?
Beautiful and ugly, good and bad, only come into being because we draw the line ourselves. The division is in the one dividing, not in the things.
All that we are arises from what we have thought. The one who looks for faults abroad keeps a tally that was always written at home.
Nothing is unclean in itself. It is our judgment about a thing, and not the thing, that makes it filthy to us.
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Psychoanalysis