Book of Common Prayer
Watch out for dangers!
12 So stop letting your hands go slack, and get some energy into your sagging knees! 13 Make straight paths for your feet. If you’re lame, make sure you get healed instead of being put out of joint. 14 Follow after peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one can see the Lord. 15 Take good care that nobody lacks God’s grace; don’t let any “root of bitterness spring up to cause trouble,” defiling many people. 16 No one must be immoral or worldly-minded, like Esau: he sold his birthright for a single meal! 17 You know, don’t you, that later on, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected. There was no way he could change either his mind or Isaac’s, even though he wept bitterly in trying to do so.
From Mount Sinai to Mount Zion
18 You haven’t come, after all, to something that can be touched—a blazing fire, darkness, gloom and whirlwind, 19 the sound of a trumpet and a voice speaking words which the hearers begged not to have to listen to anymore. 20 (They couldn’t bear the command that “if even a beast touches the mountain, it must be stoned.”) 21 The sight was so terrifying that even Moses said, “I’m trembling with fear.”
22 No: you have come to Mount Zion—to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to where thousands and thousands of angels are gathered for a festival; 23 to the assembly of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God the judge of all, to the spirits of righteous people who have been made perfect, 24 and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood which has better words to say than the blood of Abel.
The kingdom that cannot be shaken
25 Take care that you don’t refuse the one who is speaking. For if people didn’t escape when they rejected the one who gave them earthly warnings, how much more if we turn away from the one who speaks from heaven! 26 At that point, his voice shook the earth; but now he has issued a promise in the following words: “One more time I will shake not only the earth but heaven as well.” 27 The phrase “one more time” shows that the things that are to be shaken (that is, the created things) will be taken away, so that the things that cannot be shaken will remain.
28 Well, then: we are to receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken! This calls for gratitude! That’s how to offer God true and acceptable worship, reverently and with fear. 29 Our God, you see, is a devouring fire.
14 About the middle of the feast, Jesus went up into the Temple and began to teach. 15 The Judaeans were astonished.
“Where does this fellow get all his learning from?” they asked. “He’s never been trained!”
16 “My teaching isn’t my own,” replied Jesus. “It comes from the one who sent me! 17 If anyone wants to do what God wants, they will know whether this teaching is from God, or whether I’m just speaking on my own account. 18 Anyone who speaks on his own behalf is trying to establish his own reputation. But if what he’s interested in is the reputation of the one who sent him, then he is true, and there is no injustice in him.”
Moses and the Messiah
19 “Moses gave you the law, didn’t he?” Jesus continued. “But none of you obeys the law. Why are you wanting to kill me?”
20 The crowd responded to this.
“You must have a demon inside you!” they said. “Who is trying to kill you?”
21 “Look here,” replied Jesus. “I did one single thing, and you are all amazed. 22 Moses commanded you to practice circumcision (not that it starts with Moses, of course; it comes from the patriarchs), and you circumcise a man on the sabbath. 23 Well, then, if a man receives circumcision on the sabbath, so that the law of Moses may not be broken, how can you be angry with me if I make an entire man healthy on the sabbath? 24 Don’t judge by appearances! Judge with proper and right judgment!”
25 Some Jerusalem residents commented, “Isn’t this the man they’re trying to kill? 26 Look—he’s speaking quite openly, and nobody is saying anything to him. You don’t suppose our rulers really know he’s the Messiah, do you? 27 The thing is, we know where he comes from—but when the Messiah appears, nobody will know where he comes from.”
28 As Jesus was teaching in the Temple, he shouted out, “You know me! You know where I come from! I haven’t come on my own behalf—but the one who sent me is true, and you don’t know him! 29 I know him, because I come from him, and he sent me!”
30 So they tried to arrest him. But nobody laid hands on him, because his time had not yet come.
Rivers of living water
31 Many people from the crowd believed in Jesus.
“When the Messiah comes,” they were saying, “will he do more signs than this man has done?”
32 The Pharisees heard that the crowd was full of this rumor about him, and the chief priests and Pharisees sent servants to arrest him.
33 So Jesus said, “I’m just with you for a little while, and then I’m going to the one who sent me. 34 You will look for me and you won’t find me, and you can’t come where I am.”
35 “Where does he think he’s going,” said the Judaeans to one another, “if we won’t be able to find him? He’s not going to go off abroad, among the Greeks, is he, and teach the Greeks? 36 What does he mean when he says, ‘You’ll look for me and you won’t find me,’ and ‘Where I am, you can’t come’?”
Scripture quotations from The New Testament for Everyone are copyright © Nicholas Thomas Wright 2011, 2018, 2019.