Book of Common Prayer
The badge, the name and the meaning
25 Circumcision, you see, has real value for people who keep the law. If, however, you break the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. 26 Meanwhile, if uncircumcised people keep the law’s requirements, their uncircumcision will be regarded as circumcision, won’t it? 27 So people who are by nature uncircumcised, but who fulfill the law, will pass judgment on people like you who possess the letter of the law and circumcision but who break the law.
28 The “Jew” isn’t the person who appears to be one, you see. Nor is “circumcision” what it appears to be, a matter of physical flesh. 29 The “Jew” is the one in secret; and “circumcision” is a matter of the heart, in the spirit rather than the letter. Such a person gets “praise,” not from humans, but from God.
God’s determined faithfulness
3 What advantage, then, does the Jew possess? What, indeed, is the point of circumcision? 2 A great deal, in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with God’s oracles. 3 What follows from that? If some of them were unfaithful to their commission, does their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness? 4 Certainly not! Let God be true, and every human being false! As the Bible says,
So that you may be found in the right in what you say, and may win the victory when you come to court.
5 But if our being in the wrong proves that God is in the right, what are we going to say? That God is unjust to inflict anger on people? (I’m reducing things to a human scale!) 6 Certainly not! How then could God judge the world? 7 But if God’s truthfulness grows all the greater and brings him glory in and through my falsehood, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? 8 And why not “do evil so that good may come”—as some people blasphemously say about us, and as some allege that we say? People like that, at least, deserve the judgment they get!
The challenge of forgiveness
21 Then Peter came to Jesus.
“Master,” he said, “how many times must I forgive my brother when he sins against me? As many as seven times?”
22 “I wouldn’t say seven times,” replied Jesus. “Why not—seventy times seven?
23 “So, you see,” he went on, “the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle up accounts with his servants. 24 As he was beginning to sort it all out, one man was brought before him who owed ten thousand talents. 25 He had no means of paying it back, so the master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and everything he possessed, and payment to be made.
26 “So the servant fell down and prostrated himself before the master.
“ ‘Be patient with me,’ he said, ‘and I’ll pay you everything!’
27 “The master was very sorry for the servant, and let him off. He forgave him the loan.
28 “But that servant went out and found one of his fellow-servants, who owed him a hundred dinars. He seized him and began to throttle him. ‘Pay me back what you owe me!’ he said.
29 “The colleague fell down and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I’ll pay you!’
30 “But he refused, and went and threw him into prison until he could pay the debt.
31 “So when his fellow-servants saw what had happened, they were very upset. They went and informed their master about the whole affair. 32 Then his master summoned him.
“ ‘You’re a scoundrel of a servant!’ he said to him. ‘I let you off the whole debt, because you begged me to. 33 Shouldn’t you have taken pity on your colleague, like I took pity on you?’
34 “His master was angry, and handed him over to the torturers, until he had paid the whole debt. 35 And that’s what my heavenly father will do to you, unless each of you forgives your brother or sister from your heart.”
Scripture quotations from The New Testament for Everyone are copyright © Nicholas Thomas Wright 2011, 2018, 2019.