Book of Common Prayer
Abraham’s two sons
21 So, you want to live under the law, do you? All right, tell me this: are you prepared to hear what the law says? 22 For the Bible says that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave-girl and one by the free woman. 23 Now the child of the slave-girl was born according to the flesh, while the child of the free woman was born according to promise.
24 Treat this as picture-language. These two women stand for two covenants: one comes from Mount Sinai, and gives birth to slave-children; that is Hagar. 25 (Sinai, you see, is a mountain in Arabia, and it corresponds, in the picture, to the present Jerusalem, since she is in slavery with her children.) 26 But the Jerusalem which is above is free—and she is our mother.
27 For the Bible says,
Celebrate, childless one, who never gave birth!
Go wild and shout, girl that never had pains!
The barren woman has many more children
than the one who has a husband!
28 Now you, my family, are children of promise, in the line of Isaac. 29 But things now are like they were then: the one who was born according to the flesh persecuted the one born according to the spirit. 30 But what does the Bible say? “Throw out the slave-girl and her son! For the son of the slave-girl will not inherit with the son of the free.” 31 So, my family, we are not children of the slave-girl, but of the free.
The feeding of the four thousand
29 Jesus went away from there, and arrived beside the sea of Galilee. He went up the mountain and sat down. 30 Large crowds came to him, with their lame, blind, crippled, mute and many others. They laid them at his feet, and he healed them. 31 When the crowd saw the mute speaking, the crippled made whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing, they were astonished, and they gave praise to the God of Israel.
32 Jesus called his disciples, and said, “I am really sorry for the crowd. They’ve been around me now for three days and they haven’t got anything to eat. I don’t want to send them away hungry; they might faint on the way home.”
33 The disciples said to him, “Where could we get enough bread to feed a crowd this size, out here in the country?”
34 “How many loaves have you got?” asked Jesus.
“Seven,” they replied, “and a few fish.”
35 Jesus told the crowd to sit down on the ground. 36 Then he took the seven loaves and the fish, gave thanks, broke them, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 37 They all ate and were satisfied. And they picked up seven baskets full of what was left of the broken pieces. 38 There were four thousand men who had eaten, besides the women and children.
39 Jesus sent the crowds away. Then he got into the boat and went over to the Magadan coast.
Scripture quotations from The New Testament for Everyone are copyright © Nicholas Thomas Wright 2011, 2018, 2019.