Matthew 10:17 · World English Bible
Matthew 10:17 Meaning But Beware of Men
But beware of men: for they will deliver you up to councils, and in their synagogues they will scourge you.
What does Matthew 10:17 mean?
Being hunted by the crowd is the price of carrying what a person would rather not face up toward the light. Those bodies flogged in the synagogue carry real wounds, not symbols.
From the Psychoanalysis reading below.
Matthew 10:17 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Psychoanalysis
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis
Being hunted by the crowd is the price of carrying what a person would rather not face up toward the light. Those bodies flogged in the synagogue carry real wounds, not symbols. But the crowd that raises the whip acts out of a darkness it will not admit in itself. Councils are hardened group-thinking, a shared mask so rigid that anyone driven to grow whole reads as a threat.
What gets pushed down does not vanish. Cut off from awareness, it builds until it bursts out in sudden violence against whoever holds up a mirror. Every lash on the messenger's back is the crowd striking the very part of itself it cannot own. Wholeness, holding opposites at its core, cannot move far before the side left out lashes back.
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Psychoanalysis lens
Live Matthew 10:17 today
- When a group turns on someone today, in a chat, in a meeting, in a comment section, stay out of the pile. Your silence there is a real act.
- If criticism comes at you from several people at once, hold the one true piece of it and set the heat aside. The heat is usually about them.
- When you feel the urge to join the mood of a room against a person, pause. That pull is usually something in you looking for somewhere to land.
When was the last time you joined a crowd against someone, and what were you really getting rid of?
The same truth in other traditions
Taoism · Zhuangzi
The straight tree gets cut first, the crooked one is left alone. A person who stands differently will draw the group's attention, and not kindly.
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
People will do what people do. Expect it and you can keep your footing when a crowd turns on you for no reason you caused.
Buddhism · the eight worldly winds
Praise and blame both blow through and both pass. The one who leans on neither can stand in front of a crowd without being knocked over.
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