Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁴⁶ Mary responded, “Oh, how I praise the Lord. ⁴⁷ How I rejoice in God my Savior! ⁴⁸ For he took notice of his lowly servant girl, and now generation after generation forever shall call me blest of God. ⁴⁹ For he, the mighty Holy One, has done great things to me. ⁵⁰ His mercy goes on from generation to generation, to all who reverence him.

⁵¹ “How powerful is his mighty arm! How he scatters the proud and haughty ones! ⁵² He has torn princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly. ⁵³ He has satisfied the hungry hearts and sent the rich away with empty hands. ⁵⁴ And how he has helped his servant Israel! He has not forgotten his promise to be merciful. ⁵⁵ For he promised our fathers—Abraham and his children—to be merciful to them forever.”

^19-20 The entire family was up early the next morning and went to the Tabernacle to worship the Lord once more. Then they returned home to Ramah, and when Elkanah slept with Hannah, the Lord remembered her petition; in the process of time, a baby boy was born to her. She named him Samuel (meaning “asked of God”)^[a] because, as she said, “I asked the Lord for him.”

^21-22 The next year Elkanah and Peninnah and her children went on the annual trip to the Tabernacle without Hannah, for she told her husband, “Wait until the baby is weaned, and then I will take him to the Tabernacle and leave him there.”

²³ “Well, whatever you think best,” Elkanah agreed. “May the Lord’s will be done.”

So she stayed home until the baby was weaned. ²⁴ Then, though he was still so small, they took him to the Tabernacle in Shiloh, along with a three-year-old bull for the sacrifice, and a bushel of flour and some wine. ²⁵ After the sacrifice they took the child to Eli.

²⁶ “Sir, do you remember me?” Hannah asked him. “I am the woman who stood here that time praying to the Lord! ²⁷ I asked him to give me this child, and he has given me my request; ²⁸ and now I am giving him to the Lord for as long as he lives.” So she left him there at the Tabernacle for the Lord to use.

8 What we are saying is this: Christ, whose priesthood we have just described, is our High Priest and is in heaven at the place of greatest honor next to God himself. ² He ministers in the temple in heaven, the true place of worship built by the Lord and not by human hands.

³ And since every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices, Christ must make an offering too. ⁴ The sacrifice he offers is far better than those offered by the earthly priests. (But even so, if he were here on earth he wouldn’t even be permitted to be a priest because down here the priests still follow the old Jewish system of sacrifices.) ⁵ Their work is connected with a mere earthly model of the real tabernacle in heaven; for when Moses was getting ready to build the tabernacle, God warned him to follow exactly the pattern of the heavenly tabernacle as shown to him on Mount Sinai. ⁶ But Christ, as a Minister in heaven, has been rewarded with a far more important work than those who serve under the old laws because the new agreement that he passes on to us from God contains far more wonderful promises.

⁷ The old agreement didn’t even work. If it had, there would have been no need for another to replace it. ⁸ But God himself found fault with the old one, for he said, “The day will come when I will make a new agreement with the people of Israel and the people of Judah. ⁹ This new agreement will not be like the old one I gave to their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; they did not keep their part in that agreement, so I had to cancel it. ¹⁰ But this is the new agreement I will make with the people of Israel, says the Lord: I will write my laws in their minds so that they will know what I want them to do without my even telling them, and these laws will be in their hearts so that they will want to obey them, and I will be their God and they shall be my people. ¹¹ And no one then will need to speak to his friend or neighbor or brother, saying, ‘You, too, should know the Lord,’ because everyone, great and small, will know me already. ¹² And I will be merciful to them in their wrongdoings, and I will remember their sins no more.”

¹³ God speaks of these new promises, of this new agreement, as taking the place of the old one; for the old one is out of date now and has been put aside forever.