Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

¹ How happy is the one whose wrongs are forgiven,
    whose sin is hidden from sight.
² How happy is the person whose sin the Eternal will not take into account.^[b]
    How happy are those who no longer lie, to themselves or others.

³ When I refused to admit my wrongs, I was miserable,
    moaning and complaining all day long
    so that even my bones felt brittle.
⁴ Day and night, Your hand kept pressing on me.
    My strength dried up like water in the summer heat;
    You wore me down.

[pause]^[c]

⁵ When I finally saw my own lies,
    I owned up to my sins before You,
    and I did not try to hide my evil deeds from You.
I said to myself, “I’ll admit all my sins to the Eternal,”
    and You lifted and carried away the guilt of my sin.

[pause]

⁶ So let all who are devoted to You
    speak honestly to You now, while You are still listening.
For then when the floods come, surely the rushing water
    will not even reach them.
⁷ You are my hiding place.
    You will keep me out of trouble
    and envelop me with songs that remind me I am free.

[pause]

² Listen and take note,
    from the farthest reaches to the nearest!
Listen up heaven and earth,
    for the Eternal One has spoken.
    He is not happy with the children He raised.

Eternal One: Despite all I’ve done,
        My children have rebelled against Me.
³     Oxen know their owners;
        even donkeys know where their master feeds them,
    But Israel is ignorant.
        My very own, they ignore Me.

⁴ Truly this is a wicked nation,
    a people fat with wrongdoing,
Like a litter of miscreants,
    a pack of wilding adolescents.
They’ve rejected the Eternal,
    despised the Holy One of Israel;
    they’ve turned their backs on Him.

^5-6 Why do you insist on taking a beating?
    Why do you persist in such reckless rebellion?
Your bodies already suffer head to toe—
    your heads ache and hearts flutter;
Your skin is covered with bruises,
    swollen with welts, and gaping with wounds,
    with no tending, no healing, no soothing.
⁷ Your country is a waste.
    Your cities are dead, sooty rubble.
Your farms and fields are consumed,
    everything you worked for destroyed
    by foreign armies as you look on—helplessly.

⁸ Zion, our portion of heaven on earth, is no longer protected;
    Jerusalem stands like a watchman’s shelter in a vineyard,
Like a hut in a melon field,
    like a city assaulted and besieged.

⁹ Except for the fraction of us who hang on
    by the grace of the Eternal, Commander of heavenly armies,
We’d be destroyed and deserted
    like Sodom and Gomorrah, utterly done in.^[a]