Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

The letter and the spirit

3 So: we’re starting to “recommend ourselves” again, are we? Or perhaps we need—as some do—official references to give to you? Or perhaps even to get from you? ² You are our official reference! It’s written on our hearts! Everybody can know it and read it! ³ It’s quite plain that you are a letter from the Messiah, with us as the messengers—a letter not written with ink but with the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on the tablets of beating hearts.

⁴ That’s the kind of confidence we have towards God, through the Messiah. ⁵ It isn’t as though we are qualified in ourselves to reckon that we have anything to offer on our own account. Our qualification comes from God: ⁶ God has qualified us to be stewards of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the spirit. The letter kills, you see, but the spirit gives life.

The calling of Levi

¹³ Once more Jesus went out beside the sea. All the crowd came to him, and he taught them.

¹⁴ As he went along he saw Levi, son of Alphaeus, sitting at the toll booth. “Follow me!” he said. And he got up and followed him.

¹⁵ That’s how Jesus came to be sitting at home with lots of tax-collectors and sinners. There they were, plenty of them, sitting with Jesus and his disciples; they had become his followers.

¹⁶ When the legal experts from the Pharisees saw him eating with tax-collectors and sinners, they said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners?”

¹⁷ When Jesus heard it, he said to them, “It’s sick people who need the doctor, not healthy ones. I came to call the bad people, not the good ones.”

Questions about fasting

¹⁸ John’s disciples, and the Pharisees’ disciples, were fasting. People came and said to Jesus, “Look here: John’s disciples are fasting, and so are the Pharisees’ disciples; why aren’t yours?”

¹⁹ “How can the wedding guests fast,” Jesus replied, “if the bridegroom is there with them? As long as they’ve got the bridegroom with them, they can’t fast.

²⁰ “Mind you, the time is coming when the bridegroom will be taken away from them. They’ll fast then all right.

²¹ “No one sews unshrunk cloth onto an old cloak. If they do, the new patch will tear the old cloth, and they’ll end up with a worse hole. ²² Nor does anyone put new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the wine will burst the skins, and they’ll lose the wine and the skins together. New wine needs fresh skins.”