Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

29 Praise the Lord, you angels of his; praise his glory and his strength. ² Praise him for his majestic glory, the glory of his name. Come before him clothed in sacred garments.

³ The voice of the Lord echoes from the clouds. The God of glory thunders through the skies. ⁴ So powerful is his voice; so full of majesty. ^5-6 It breaks down the cedars. It splits the giant trees of Lebanon. It shakes Mount Lebanon and Mount Sirion. They leap and skip before him like young calves! ⁷ The voice of the Lord thunders through the lightning. ⁸ It resounds through the deserts and shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. ⁹ The voice of the Lord spins and topples the mighty oaks.^[a] It strips the forests bare. They whirl and sway beneath the blast. But in his Temple all are praising, “Glory, glory to the Lord.”

¹⁰ At the Flood the Lord showed his control of all creation. Now he continues to unveil his power. ¹¹ He will give his people strength. He will bless them with peace.

¹² Then the Spirit lifted me up, and the glory of the Lord began to move away, accompanied by the sound of a great earthquake.^{[a] 13} It was the noise of the wings of the living beings as they touched against each other, and the sound of their wheels beside them.

^14-15 The Spirit lifted me up, and took me away to Tel Abib, another colony of Jewish exiles beside the Chebar River. I went in bitterness and anger,^[b] but the hand of the Lord was strong upon me. And I sat among them, overwhelmed, for seven days.

¹⁶ At the end of the seven days, the Lord said to me:

¹⁷ “Son of dust, I have appointed you as a watchman for Israel; whenever I send my people a warning, pass it on to them at once. ¹⁸ If you refuse to warn the wicked when I want you to tell them, ‘You are under the penalty of death; therefore repent and save your life,’ they will die in their sins, but I will punish you. I will demand your blood for theirs. ¹⁹ But if you warn them, and they keep on sinning and refuse to repent, they will die in their sins, but you are blameless—you have done all you could. ²⁰ And if a good man becomes bad, and you refuse to warn him of the consequences, and the Lord destroys him, his previous good deeds won’t help him—he shall die in his sin. But I will hold you responsible for his death and punish you. ²¹ But if you warn him and he repents, he shall live, and you have saved your own life too.”

¹⁸ One day as he was alone, praying, with his disciples nearby, he came over and asked them, “Who are the people saying I am?”

¹⁹ “John the Baptist,” they told him, “or perhaps Elijah or one of the other ancient prophets risen from the dead.”

²⁰ Then he asked them, “Who do you think I am?”

Peter replied, “The Messiah—the Christ of God!”

²¹ He gave them strict orders not to speak of this to anyone. ²² “For I, the Messiah,^[a] must suffer much,” he said, “and be rejected by the Jewish leaders—the elders, chief priests, and teachers of the Law—and be killed; and three days later I will come back to life again!”

²³ Then he said to all, “Anyone who wants to follow me must put aside his own desires and conveniences and carry his cross with him every day and keep close to me! ²⁴ Whoever loses his life for my sake will save it, but whoever insists on keeping his life will lose it; ²⁵ and what profit is there in gaining the whole world when it means forfeiting one’s self?

²⁶ “When I, the Messiah, come in my glory and in the glory of the Father and the holy angels, I will be ashamed then of all who are ashamed of me and of my words now. ²⁷ But this is the simple truth—some of you who are standing here right now will not die until you have seen the Kingdom of God.”