Book of Common Prayer

¹³ Come now, you who say, Today and tomorrow let us go into such and such a city, and continue there a year, and buy, and sell, and make money, ¹⁴ and yet do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what thing is your life? It is even a vapour, which appears for a little time and then vanishes away. ¹⁵ Therefore you ought to say, If the Lord so wills, and if we live, let us do this or that. ¹⁶ But now you glory in your boastings. All such glorying is evil.

¹⁷ Therefore, to him who knows how to do good but does it not, to him it is sin.

He threatens the wicked rich people. He exhorts to patience, to beware of swearing, to acknowledge our faults to one another, to pray for one another, and one to labour to bring another to the truth.

5 Come now, ye rich people. Weep and howl over your wretchedness that will come upon you. ² Your riches are corrupt; your garments are moth eaten. ³ Your gold and your silver are cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and will eat your flesh as it were fire.

You have heaped treasure together in your last days. ⁴ Behold, the wages of the labourers who have reaped down your fields (which wages you kept back by fraud) cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord Sabaoth. ⁵ You have lived in pleasure on the earth, and in wantonness. You have fattened your hearts as in a day of slaughter. ⁶ You have condemned and have killed the just, and he has not resisted you.

²⁰ When he was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God does not come with watching for it. ²¹ Neither may men say, See here, look there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

²² And he said to the disciples, The days will come when you will desire to see one day of the Son of man, and you will not see it. ²³ And they will say to you, See here, see there! Do not go after them or follow them. ²⁴ For as the lightning that appears out of the one part of the heaven and shines to the other part of heaven, so shall the Son of man be in his days. ²⁵ But first he must suffer many things, and be refused by this nation.

²⁶ As it happened in the time of Noah, so shall it be in the time of the Son of man: ²⁷ they ate, they drank, they married wives, and were married, right up to the same day that Noah went into the ark; and the flood came and destroyed them all. ²⁸ Likewise also as it happened in the days of Lot: they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built. ²⁹ And even the same day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. ³⁰ After these examples shall it be in the day when the Son of man appears.

³¹ At that day, let him who is on the housetop, with his stuff in the house, not come down to take it out. And likewise, let not him who is in the fields turn back again to what he left behind. ³² Remember Lot’s wife. ³³ Whosoever would go about to save his life, shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life, shall save it. ³⁴ I tell you, in that night there will be two in one bed; the one will be received, and the other will be left. ³⁵ Two will also be a-grinding together; the one will be received, and the other left.

³⁷ And they answered and said to him, Where, Lord? And he said to them, Wherever the body is, there will the eagles resort.