Ezekiel 24:6 · World English Bible
‘Therefore the Lord Yahweh says: “Woe to the bloody city, to the cauldron whose rust is in it, and whose rust hasn’t gone out of it! Take out of it piece after piece. No lot is fallen on it.
The warning lands on a pot so crusted with rust that the corrosion has eaten into the metal and will not scrub off. The rust pictures a heart left uncleaned, where cruelty and old wrongs harden layer on layer until they become the surface itself.
From the Sufism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SUFISM
The warning lands on a pot so crusted with rust that the corrosion has eaten into the metal and will not scrub off. The rust pictures a heart left uncleaned, where cruelty and old wrongs harden layer on layer until they become the surface itself. The cure is the harder truth buried in the threat: scour early, before the stain sets, through honest self-examination and turning back.
A neglected blade is not lost while there is still steel beneath the corrosion. Even the stern demand that the pot be emptied and cleaned is mercy wearing a hard face, the metal being made ready to shine.
Sufism lens
What have you let sit so long that it has started to feel like who you are?
Rust is born of the iron and then eats the iron away, and in the same way a person's own deeds consume the person. The warning is about what sets in slowly, not what strikes.
Marcus wrote that the soul takes the color of the thoughts it dwells on. Which is why he cleaned his thinking daily instead of waiting for it to need rescue.
The rabbis said a wrong repeated stops feeling forbidden and starts feeling permitted. The remedy was taken up early, while the thing was still small enough to move.
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