Matthew 24:10 Meaning Then Many Will Stumble

When the mind holds fear as its teacher, the closest bond turns brittle and the brother becomes the enemy. Offense, betrayal, and hatred are not separate sins but one movement seen at different distances: guilt within, unable to be borne, thrown onto another so the burden seems to belong to him. Each betrayal is the mind trying to be rid of a self-accusation by finding it in someone else.

The others in this scene are not many people but one relationship the mind keeps having with itself. To hate a brother is to guard the guilt you refuse to look at, for as long as he is guilty you need not question your own innocence, and so the dream of enemies goes on.

One another: the brother, who is the mirror in which the mind meets its own hidden guilt.

Under pressure the crowd of thoughts inside a person turns on itself: the many faculties that should serve one center fracture, each stumbling, each handing the others over, each feeding the resentment that flesh generates when the light dims. This is not nations abroad but the civil war of a divided mind, where impulses betray the will and old loyalties within collapse.

What scatters a person is the same thing that scatters a house set against itself. When the ruling awareness weakens, the lower parts no longer cohere; they accuse and abandon one another, and the man who was many voices becomes a mob with no king. The falling-away described here is the inner community coming apart before it can be gathered into one.

Many: the crowd of thoughts and faculties within a person that should serve one center but here turn against each other