Mid-century illustration of a calm sea at dawn

Mark 6:11 · World English Bible

Mark 6:11 Meaning Whoever Will Not Receive You Nor Hear

Whoever will not receive you nor hear you, as you depart from there, shake off the dust that is under your feet for a testimony against them. Assuredly, I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city!

What does Mark 6:11 mean?

Where an offering of peace is refused, the mind is tempted to carry the refusal home as a wound and to store the rejection as one more grievance against the world. To shake the dust from the feet is to leave that residue behind, to let a closed door stay the other's choice and not become a stone the messenger drags forward.

From the Christian Psychology reading below.

Mark 6:11 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Christian Psychology

Where an offering of peace is refused, the mind is tempted to carry the refusal home as a wound and to store the rejection as one more grievance against the world. To shake the dust from the feet is to leave that residue behind, to let a closed door stay the other's choice and not become a stone the messenger drags forward. Nothing is owed and nothing is lost when love is declined; only the one who withholds it remains, for a while, outside the welcome he has not yet chosen.

A mind that keeps no dust keeps no grievance, and so comes to the next threshold unburdened and whole.

Dust: the residue of rejection the mind is tempted to gather up and carry, the small grievance it stores as evidence against another. Feet: the part of the mind that moves on and chooses what to bring forward, the ground where it decides whether to travel light or laden. City: a mind shut against the offer, the closed gathering that has turned the gift away and left itself, for now, outside its own peace.

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Christian Psychology lens

Live Mark 6:11 today

  1. Delete the draft of the reply you will never send. You have rewritten it four times, and each rewrite hands them another hour of your day.
  2. When someone is short with you at the store or in traffic, let it be their morning, not yours. You do not have to take it home.
  3. After a meeting where you got dismissed, walk once around the block before your next thing, and arrive at it without the last one attached.

What are you still carrying that you could have set down at the door?

The same truth in other traditions

Buddhism

If someone offers you a gift of anger and you do not take it, whose anger is it? You can leave it in their hands.

Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius

You can choose not to be harmed, and then you are not harmed. The injury lives in the opinion you keep about it.

Taoism · Zhuangzi

If an empty boat drifts into yours, no one shouts. The anger was never in the collision, it was in the person you imagined steering.

Mid-century illustration of Jesus teaching the crowd on a hillside above the sea

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