Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁴ For all those words which were written long ago are meant to teach us today; that when we read in the scriptures of the endurance of men and of all the help that God gave them in those days, we may be encouraged to go on hoping in our own time.

^5-7 May the God who inspires men to endure, and gives them a Father’s care, give you a mind united towards one another because of your common loyalty to Jesus Christ. And then, as one man, you will sing from the heart the praises of God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. So open your hearts to one another as Christ has opened his heart to you, and God will be glorified.

A reminder—Christ the universal saviour

^8-9 Christ was made a servant of the Jews to prove God’s trustworthiness, since he personally implemented the promises made long ago to the fathers, and also that the Gentiles might bring glory to God for his mercy to them. It is written: ‘For this reason I will confess to you among the Gentiles, and sing to your name’.

¹⁰ And again: ‘Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people!’

¹¹ And yet again: ‘Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles! Laud him, all you peoples!’

¹² And then Isaiah says: ‘There shall be a root of Jesse; and he who shall rise to reign over the Gentiles, in him the Gentiles shall hope’.

¹³ May the God of hope fill you with joy and peace in your faith, that by the power of the Holy Spirit, your whole life and outlook may be radiant with hope.

The prophesied “Elijah”: John the Baptist

3 ^1-2 In due course John the Baptist arrived, preaching in the Judean desert: “You must change your hearts—for the kingdom of Heaven has arrived!”

³ This was the man whom the prophet Isaiah spoke about in the words: ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’.

^4-6 John wore clothes of camel-hair with a leather belt round his waist, and lived on locusts and wild honey. The people of Jerusalem and of all Judea and the Jordan district flocked to him, and were baptised by him in the river Jordan, publicly confessing their sins.

^7-9 But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism he said: “Who warned you, you serpent’s brood, to escape from the wrath to come? Go and do something to show that your hearts are really changed. Don’t suppose that you can say to yourselves, ‘We are Abraham’s children’, for I tell you that God could produce children of Abraham out of these stones!

^10-12 “The axe already lies at the root of the tree, and the tree that fails to produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. It is true that I baptise you with water as a sign of your repentance, but the one who follows me is far stronger than I am—indeed I am not fit to carry his shoes. He will baptise you with the fire of the Holy Spirit. He comes all ready to separate the wheat from the chaff and very thoroughly will he clear his threshing-floor—the wheat he will collect into the granary and the chaff he will burn with a fire that can never be put out.”