Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)
מ (Mem)
97 How I love your Torah!
I meditate on it all day.
98 I am wiser than my foes,
because your mitzvot are mine forever.
99 I have more understanding than all my teachers,
because I meditate on your instruction.
100 I understand more than my elders,
because I keep your precepts.
101 I keep my feet from every evil way,
in order to observe your word.
102 I don’t turn away from your rulings,
because you have instructed me.
103 How sweet to my tongue is your promise,
truly sweeter than honey in my mouth!
104 From your precepts I gain understanding;
this is why I hate every false way.
10 “Now I will arise,” says Adonai,
“Now I will exalt and lift myself up.
11 You conceive chaff and give birth to stubble,
your breath is a fire devouring you.
12 The peoples will be as if burned into lime,
like thorns cut off to burn in the fire.
13 You living far off, hear what I have done!
You who are near, acknowledge my strength!”
14 The sinners in Tziyon are frightened;
trembling has seized the ungodly.
“Who of us can live with the devouring fire?
Who of us can live with eternal burning?”
15 He whose life is right and whose speech is straight,
he who scorns getting rich by extortion,
he who shakes his hands free of bribes,
stops his ears against talk of bloodshed
and shuts his eyes against looking at evil.
16 Such a person will live on the heights,
his refuge a fortress among the cliffs,
his food and water in steady supply.
16 You did not choose me, I chose you; and I have commissioned you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last; so that whatever you ask from the Father in my name he may give you. 17 This is what I command you: keep loving each other!
18 “If the world hates you, understand that it hated me first. 19 If you belonged to the world, the world would have loved its own. But because you do not belong to the world — on the contrary, I have picked you out of the world — therefore the world hates you. 20 Remember what I told you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you too; if they kept my word, they will keep yours too. 21 But they will do all this to you on my account, because they don’t know the One who sent me.
22 “If I had not come and spoken to them, they wouldn’t be guilty of sin; but now, they have no excuse for their sin. 23 Whoever hates me hates my Father also. 24 If I had not done in their presence works which no one else ever did, they would not be guilty of sin; but now, they have seen them and have hated both me and my Father. 25 But this has happened in order to fulfill the words in their Torah which read, ‘They hated me for no reason at all.’[a]
Copyright © 1998 by David H. Stern. All rights reserved.