Book of Common Prayer

Recognizing the body

²³ This, you see, is what I received from the Lord, and handed on to you. On the night when the Lord Jesus was betrayed, he took bread, ²⁴ gave thanks, broke it, and said, “This is my body; it’s for you! Do this in remembrance of me.” ²⁵ He did the same with the cup after supper, and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.” ²⁶ For whenever you eat this bread and drink the cup, you are announcing the Lord’s death until he comes.

²⁷ It follows from this that anyone who eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. ²⁸ Everyone should test themselves; that’s how you should eat the bread and drink the cup. ²⁹ You see, if you eat and drink without recognizing the body, you eat and drink judgment on yourself. ³⁰ That’s why several of you are weak and sick, and some have died. ³¹ But if we learned how to judge ourselves, we would not incur judgment. ³² But when we are judged by the Lord, we are punished, so that we won’t be condemned along with the world.

³³ So, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, treat one another as honored guests by waiting for each other. ³⁴ If anyone is hungry, they should eat at home, so that you don’t come together and find yourselves facing judgment. I will put the other matters in order when I come.

The call of Matthew

⁹ As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-office.

“Follow me!” he said to him. And he got up and followed him.

¹⁰ When he was at home, sitting down to a meal, there were lots of tax-collectors and sinners there who had come to have dinner with Jesus and his disciples. ¹¹ When the Pharisees saw it, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?”

¹² Jesus heard them.

“It isn’t the healthy who need a doctor,” he said, “it’s the sick. ¹³ Go and learn what this saying means: ‘It’s mercy I want, not sacrifice.’ My job isn’t to call upright people, but sinners.”

¹⁴ Then John’s disciples came to him with a question.

“How come,” they asked, “we and the Pharisees fast frequently, but your disciples don’t fast at all?”

¹⁵ “Wedding guests can’t fast, can they,” replied Jesus, “as long as the bridegroom is with them? But sooner or later the bridegroom will be taken away from them. They’ll fast then all right.

¹⁶ “No one,” he went on, “sews a patch of unshrunk cloth onto an old coat. The patch will simply pull away from the coat, and you’ll have a worse hole than you started with. ¹⁷ People don’t put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the skins will split, the wine will be lost, and the skins will be ruined. They put new wine into new skins, and then both are fine.”