Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

100 Shout with joy before the Lord, O earth! ² Obey him gladly; come before him, singing with joy.

³ Try to realize what this means—the Lord is God! He made us—we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

⁴ Go through his open gates with great thanksgiving; enter his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and bless his name. ⁵ For the Lord is always good. He is always loving and kind, and his faithfulness goes on and on to each succeeding generation.

^28-29 and to whom the Lord said, “I am Jehovah. Go in and give Pharaoh the message I have given you.”

³⁰ This is that Moses who argued with the Lord, “I can’t do it; I’m no speaker—why should Pharaoh listen to me?”

7 Then the Lord said to Moses, “See, I have appointed you as my ambassador to Pharaoh, and your brother, Aaron, shall be your spokesman. ² Tell Aaron everything I say to you, and he will announce it to Pharaoh, demanding that the people of Israel be allowed to leave Egypt. ³ But I will cause Pharaoh to stubbornly refuse, and I will multiply my miracles in the land of Egypt. ⁴ Yet even then Pharaoh won’t listen to you; so I will crush Egypt with a final major disaster and then lead my people out. ⁵ The Egyptians will find out that I am indeed God when I show them my power and force them to let my people go.”

⁶ So Moses and Aaron did as the Lord commanded them. ⁷ Moses was eighty years old and Aaron eighty-three at this time of their confrontation with Pharaoh.

⁸ Then the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, ⁹ “Pharaoh will demand that you show him a miracle to prove that God has sent you; when he does, Aaron is to throw down his rod, and it will become a serpent.”

¹⁰ So Moses and Aaron went in to see Pharaoh, and performed the miracle, as Jehovah had instructed them—Aaron threw down his rod before Pharaoh and his court, and it became a serpent. ¹¹ Then Pharaoh called in his sorcerers—the magicians of Egypt—and they were able to do the same thing with their magical arts! ¹² Their rods became serpents, too! But Aaron’s serpent swallowed their serpents! ¹³ Pharaoh’s heart was still hard and stubborn, and he wouldn’t listen, just as the Lord had predicted.

7 One day some Jewish religious leaders arrived from Jerusalem to investigate him, ² and noticed that some of his disciples failed to follow the usual Jewish rituals before eating. ³ (For the Jews, especially the Pharisees, will never eat until they have sprinkled their arms to the elbows,^[a] as required by their ancient traditions. ⁴ So when they come home from the market, they must always sprinkle themselves in this way before touching any food. This is but one of many examples of laws and regulations they have clung to for centuries, and still follow, such as their ceremony of cleansing for pots, pans, and dishes.)

⁵ So the religious leaders asked him, “Why don’t your disciples follow our age-old customs? For they eat without first performing the washing ceremony.”

^6-7 Jesus replied, “You bunch of hypocrites! Isaiah the prophet described you very well when he said, ‘These people speak very prettily about the Lord but they have no love for him at all. Their worship is a farce, for they claim that God commands the people to obey their petty rules.’ How right Isaiah was! ⁸ For you ignore God’s specific orders and substitute your own traditions. ⁹ You are simply rejecting God’s laws and trampling them under your feet for the sake of tradition.

¹⁰ “For instance, Moses gave you this law from God: ‘Honor your father and mother.’ And he said that anyone who speaks against his father or mother must die. ¹¹ But you say it is perfectly all right for a man to disregard his needy parents, telling them, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you! For I have given to God what I could have given to you.’ ^12-13 And so you break the law of God in order to protect your man-made tradition. And this is only one example. There are many, many others.”