Proverbs 17:26 · World English Bible
Proverbs 17:26 Meaning Also to Punish the Righteous Is Not
Also to punish the righteous is not good, nor to flog officials for their integrity.
What does Proverbs 17:26 mean?
To strike at what is innocent is the ego's whole vocation, for it must find someone at fault so its own guilt can seem to rest elsewhere. When a mind punishes the just it is attacking the very innocence it shares, laying its hidden self-condemnation on a brother who did no wrong and calling the blow fairness.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Proverbs 17:26 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
To strike at what is innocent is the ego's whole vocation, for it must find someone at fault so its own guilt can seem to rest elsewhere. When a mind punishes the just it is attacking the very innocence it shares, laying its hidden self-condemnation on a brother who did no wrong and calling the blow fairness.
But nothing is gained by wounding the guiltless, because the guilt was never in the one struck. It was in the mind that needed a target. The correction is to see innocence where the ego insisted on a criminal, and in withholding the blow the mind discovers it had nothing to punish anywhere, least of all in itself.
The just: the innocent brother the ego marks for blame, the guiltless one chosen as a place to set down a guilt that was never his Princes: the parts of the mind that carry dignity and worth, struck at whenever the ego needs to prove someone deserves attack
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Live Proverbs 17:26 today
- Scroll past the person online you were about to tear into and ask what it is in you that needed them to be guilty today. Then close the app instead of typing.
- When you catch yourself making your partner or roommate the reason for your bad mood, name the real reason out loud, even clumsily. They were not the thing that went wrong.
- In the meeting where someone has to take the blame for the missed deadline, refuse to let it land on the quietest person in the room. Say the problem was the plan, not the person.
Who have you been quietly blaming for something that was never theirs?
The same truth in other traditions
Taoism · Zhuangzi
The empty boat that bumps into yours makes you shout. Discover no one is aboard, and the anger has nowhere to land. The anger was yours, not the boat's.
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
When someone does wrong, ask what idea of good or bad led him to it. Seeing that, you will pity rather than strike.
Buddhism · Dhammapada
Hurling harm at someone innocent is like throwing fine dust into the wind. It turns and comes back to the one who threw it.
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