Matthew 26:9 · World English Bible
Matthew 26:9 Meaning For This Ointment Might Have Been Sold
For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.
What does Matthew 26:9 mean?
Even charity can become the ego's disguise when it is used to reason love away. To say the gift should have been sold and the proceeds scattered is to trade the immediate act of love for a virtue that costs the giver nothing of himself.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Matthew 26:9 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
Even charity can become the ego's disguise when it is used to reason love away. To say the gift should have been sold and the proceeds scattered is to trade the immediate act of love for a virtue that costs the giver nothing of himself. The mind that prefers the abstract poor to the person present has found a righteous way to withhold, dressing its refusal of the moment in the language of good.
A mind that turns a living gift into a ledger of usefulness has not chosen the poor over indulgence. It has chosen calculation over love. The poor it names are a screen, and behind the screen is the same fear of pouring oneself out without return. Real giving does not wait for a better use; it gives where love is, now.
Ointment: love offered directly and without measure, here reduced to a price The poor: the abstract cause the ego invokes to excuse its refusal of love in the present
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Live Matthew 26:9 today
- The next time you catch yourself thinking I should really do something bigger about this, do the small thing instead. Send the twenty dollars, make the call, today.
- When a friend asks for your time, do not redirect them to a better resource straight away. Give them you first, then the link.
- In a meeting where everyone is debating the ideal plan, name the one small action someone can take before Friday. The person in front of you is more real than the perfect version of the problem.
Where are you using a better cause as a polite reason to do nothing right now?
The same truth in other traditions
Confucianism · Analects
Asked what goodness is, Confucius answered simply, love people. The teaching was never an argument, it was the person in front of you.
Zen
When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep. The practice is the thing at hand, not a better thing imagined elsewhere.
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
Stop arguing about what a good person should be. Be one, now, with whoever is standing in front of you.
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