Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

145 ^1-2 I will praise you, my God and King, and bless your name each day and forever.

³ Great is Jehovah! Greatly praise him! His greatness is beyond discovery! ⁴ Let each generation tell its children what glorious things he does. ⁵ I will meditate about your glory, splendor, majesty, and miracles. ⁶ Your awe-inspiring deeds shall be on every tongue; I will proclaim your greatness. ⁷ Everyone will tell about how good you are and sing about your righteousness.

⁸ Jehovah is kind and merciful, slow to get angry, full of love.

¹³ and so will the lands of the north; he will destroy Assyria and make its great capital Nineveh a desolate wasteland like a wilderness. ¹⁴ That once proud city will become a pastureland for sheep. All sorts of wild animals will have their homes in her. Hedgehogs will burrow there; the vultures and the owls will live among the ruins of her palaces, hooting from the gaping windows; the ravens will croak from her doors. All her cedar paneling will lie open to the wind and weather.

¹⁵ This is the fate of that vast, prosperous city that lived in such security, that said to herself, “In all the world there is no city as great as I.” But now—see how she has become a place of utter ruins, a place for animals to live! Everyone passing that way will mock or shake his head in disbelief.^[a]

²³ Then Jesus said to his disciples, “It is almost impossible for a rich man to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. ²⁴ I say it again—it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God!”

²⁵ This remark confounded the disciples. “Then who in the world can be saved?” they asked.

²⁶ Jesus looked at them intently and said, “Humanly speaking, no one. But with God, everything is possible.”

²⁷ Then Peter said to him, “We left everything to follow you. What will we get out of it?”

²⁸ And Jesus replied, “When I, the Messiah,^[a] shall sit upon my glorious throne in the Kingdom, you my disciples shall certainly sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. ²⁹ And anyone who gives up his home, brothers, sisters, father, mother, wife,^[b] children, or property, to follow me, shall receive a hundred times as much in return, and shall have eternal life. ³⁰ But many who are first now will be last then; and some who are last now will be first then.”