Matthew 10:14 · World English Bible
Matthew 10:14 Meaning Whoever Doesn’t Receive You
Whoever doesn’t receive you, nor hear your words, as you go out of that house or that city, shake the dust off your feet.
What does Matthew 10:14 mean?
Shaking the dust from your feet at a shut door is the act of taking back what you had cast onto a person who has refused to grow. In old symbol-language, a city or house pictures the whole self, a fourfold completeness whose four gates match the four ways the mind takes in the world.
From the Psychoanalysis reading below.
Matthew 10:14 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Psychoanalysis
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis
Shaking the dust from your feet at a shut door is the act of taking back what you had cast onto a person who has refused to grow. In old symbol-language, a city or house pictures the whole self, a fourfold completeness whose four gates match the four ways the mind takes in the world.
When that city bars the door, it makes the everyday self's most stubborn mistake: locking itself out of its own depths. A messenger who lingers too long becomes a screen for what others cannot own, soaking up the dark stuff that belongs to the refusing house, not to the one walking away. Shaking the dust loose is a small household way of releasing what belongs to another, so a person's growth can go on.
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Psychoanalysis lens
Live Matthew 10:14 today
- After a conversation that went badly today, stand up and move. Walk to the kitchen, go around the block, and leave the conversation in the room where it happened.
- When someone will not hear you, say your piece once, plainly, and then stop. Repeating it louder just makes you the one carrying all the weight.
- Before bed, put down the one comment you have been replaying. Their mood from today was never yours to take home and sleep with.
What are you still carrying that someone handed you and never asked for back?
The same truth in other traditions
Stoicism · Epictetus
Some things are yours and some are not. Another person's refusal belongs to them, and picking it up as your own burden is where the real damage starts.
Taoism · Zhuangzi
If a drifting boat bumps you, there is no one in it to be angry at. Much of what hits you today has no one in it either.
Buddhism · the insult not accepted
A man came to the Buddha and abused him, and the Buddha asked what happens to a gift no one takes. What is not accepted stays with the one who brought it.
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