Matthew 23:38 · World English Bible
Matthew 23:38 Meaning Behold
Behold, your house is left to you desolate.
What does Matthew 23:38 mean?
The house is the body-temple, the whole structure a person lives in, and it is left desolate when the higher presence withdraws from it. A dwelling is only alive while the spirit inhabits it; empty it, and the same walls stand as a shell with nothing moving inside.
From the Esoteric reading below.
Matthew 23:38 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Esoteric
ESOTERIC
Esoteric
The house is the body-temple, the whole structure a person lives in, and it is left desolate when the higher presence withdraws from it. A dwelling is only alive while the spirit inhabits it; empty it, and the same walls stand as a shell with nothing moving inside. This is what happens when a person shuts out the inner light long enough, clinging to the outward form of religion and appearance while the living current departs. The rooms remain, the habits remain, but the tenant is gone.
Desolation here is not a curse sent from outside but the natural emptiness of a temple that has driven off its own indweller. A body without the awakened self within it goes on standing, yet nothing lives there, and the person feels the hollowness of a house no presence fills.
House: the body-temple, the whole structure a person lives in, alive only while the indwelling spirit fills it.
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Esoteric lens
Live Matthew 23:38 today
- Walk through one room of your home today and see it as it actually is, not as the list of things you meant to fix. Stand there a minute with nothing playing and let the room be occupied by you.
- At dinner or on a call, put the phone face down somewhere out of reach. Being physically present with someone while mentally elsewhere is the emptiest version of a visit, and they can feel it.
- When a day has been nothing but motion, inbox to meeting to commute, stop at a red light or in the parking lot and give yourself sixty seconds of just sitting there. Come back into the body before you walk in the door.
Which parts of my life am I still keeping up the shape of, after I stopped actually being there?
The same truth in other traditions
Zen
A learned visitor came for teaching and the master poured tea until the cup overflowed, then kept pouring. You are full of your own opinions, he said. Empty the cup and then come.
Tao Te Ching 11
The room is made livable by the emptiness between the walls, not the walls. What matters in any structure is the presence it holds, and a house no one lives in is only the idea of a house.
Sufism
The Sufis build on the saying that God is nearer to a person than his own jugular vein. The ache of absence is not distance at all. It is the one place we never look.
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