Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁵ You false prophets! You who lead his people astray! You who cry “Peace” to those who give you food and threaten those who will not pay!

This is God’s message to you: ⁶ “The night will close about you and cut off all your visions; darkness will cover you with never a word from God. The sun will go down upon you, and your day will end. ⁷ Then at last you will cover your faces in shame and admit that your messages were not from God.”

⁸ But as for me, I am filled with power, with the Spirit of the Lord, fearlessly announcing God’s punishment on Israel for her sins.

⁹ Listen to me, you leaders of Israel who hate justice and love unfairness ¹⁰ and fill Jerusalem with murder and sin of every kind— ¹¹ you leaders who take bribes; you priests and prophets who won’t preach and prophesy until you’re paid. (And yet you fawn upon the Lord and say, “All is well—the Lord is here among us. No harm can come to us.”) ¹² It is because of you that Jerusalem will be plowed like a field and become a heap of rubble; the mountaintop where the Temple stands will be overgrown with brush.

43 O God, defend me from the charges of these merciless, deceitful men. ² For you are God, my only place of refuge. Why have you tossed me aside? Why must I mourn at the oppression of my enemies?

³ Oh, send out your light and your truth—let them lead me. Let them lead me to your Temple on your holy mountain, Zion. ⁴ There I will go to the altar of God, my exceeding joy, and praise him with my harp. O God—my God! ⁵ O my soul, why be so gloomy and discouraged? Trust in God! I shall again praise him for his wondrous help; he will make me smile again,^[a] for he is my God!

⁹ Don’t you remember, dear brothers, how hard we worked among you? Night and day we toiled and sweated to earn enough to live on so that our expenses would not be a burden to anyone there, as we preached God’s Good News among you. ¹⁰ You yourselves are our witnesses—as is God—that we have been pure and honest and faultless toward every one of you. ¹¹ We talked to you as a father to his own children—don’t you remember?—pleading with you, encouraging you and even demanding ¹² that your daily lives should not embarrass God but bring joy to him who invited you into his Kingdom to share his glory.

¹³ And we will never stop thanking God for this: that when we preached to you, you didn’t think of the words we spoke as being just our own, but you accepted what we said as the very Word of God—which, of course, it was—and it changed your lives when you believed it.

23 Then Jesus said to the crowds, and to his disciples, ² “You would think these Jewish leaders and these Pharisees were Moses, the way they keep making up so many laws!^{[a] 3} And of course you should obey their every whim! It may be all right to do what they say, but above anything else, don’t follow their example. For they don’t do what they tell you to do. ⁴ They load you with impossible demands that they themselves don’t even try to keep.

⁵ “Everything they do is done for show. They act holy^[b] by wearing on their arms little prayer boxes with Scripture verses inside, and by lengthening the memorial fringes of their robes. ⁶ And how they love to sit at the head table at banquets and in the reserved pews in the synagogue! ⁷ How they enjoy the deference paid them on the streets and to be called ‘Rabbi’ and ‘Master’! ⁸ Don’t ever let anyone call you that. For only God is your Rabbi and all of you are on the same level, as brothers. ⁹ And don’t address anyone here on earth as ‘Father,’ for only God in heaven should be addressed like that. ¹⁰ And don’t be called ‘Master,’ for only one is your master, even the Messiah.

¹¹ “The more lowly your service to others, the greater you are. To be the greatest, be a servant. ¹² But those who think themselves great shall be disappointed and humbled; and those who humble themselves shall be exalted.