Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

¹⁰ “My life is but half done and I must leave it all. I am robbed of my normal years, and now I must enter the gates of Sheol. ¹¹ Never again will I see the Lord in the land of the living. Never again will I see my friends in this world. ¹² My life is blown away like a shepherd’s tent; it is cut short as when a weaver stops his working at the loom. In one short day my life hangs by a thread.

¹³ “All night I moaned; it was like being torn apart by lions. ¹⁴ Delirious, I chattered like a swallow and mourned like a dove; my eyes grew weary of looking up for help. ‘O God,’ I cried, ‘I am in trouble—help me.’ ¹⁵ But what can I say? For he himself has sent this sickness. All my sleep has fled because of my soul’s bitterness. ¹⁶ O Lord, your discipline is good and leads to life and health. Oh, heal me and make me live!

¹⁷ “Yes, now I see it all—it was good for me to undergo this bitterness, for you have lovingly delivered me from death; you have forgiven all my sins. ¹⁸ For dead men cannot praise you.^[a] They cannot be filled with hope and joy. ¹⁹ The living, only the living, can praise you as I do today. One generation makes known your faithfulness to the next. ²⁰ Think of it! The Lord healed me! Every day of my life from now on I will sing my songs of praise in the Temple, accompanied by the orchestra.”

⁹ The Philistines in turn sent a huge posse into Judah and raided Lehi.

¹⁰ “Why have you come here?” the men of Judah asked.

And the Philistines replied, “To capture Samson and do to him as he has done to us.”

¹¹ So three thousand men of Judah went down to get Samson at the cave in the rock of Etam.

“What are you doing to us?” they demanded of him. “Don’t you realize that the Philistines are our rulers?”

But Samson replied, “I only paid them back for what they did to me.”

^12-13 “We have come to capture you and take you to the Philistines,” the men of Judah told him.

“All right,” Samson said, “but promise me that you won’t kill me yourselves.”

“No,” they replied, “we won’t do that.”

So they tied him with two new ropes and led him away. ¹⁴ As Samson and his captors arrived at Lehi, the Philistines shouted with glee; but then the strength of the Lord came upon Samson, and the ropes with which he was tied snapped like thread and fell from his wrists! ¹⁵ Then he picked up a donkey’s jawbone that was lying on the ground and killed a thousand Philistines with it. ^16-17 Tossing away the jawbone, he remarked,

(The place has been called “Jawbone Hill” ever since.)

¹⁸ But now he was very thirsty and he prayed to the Lord and said, “You have given Israel such a wonderful deliverance through me today! Must I now die of thirst and fall to the mercy of these heathen?” ¹⁹ So the Lord caused water to gush out from a hollow in the ground, and Samson’s spirit was revived as he drank. Then he named the place “The Spring of the Man Who Prayed,” and the spring is still there today.

²⁰ Samson was Israel’s leader for the next twenty years, but the Philistines still controlled the land.

¹⁴ When they arrived at the bottom of the hill, a huge crowd was waiting for them. A man came and knelt before Jesus and said, ¹⁵ “Sir, have mercy on my son, for he is mentally deranged and in great trouble, for he often falls into the fire or into the water; ¹⁶ so I brought him to your disciples, but they couldn’t cure him.”

¹⁷ Jesus replied, “Oh, you stubborn, faithless people! How long shall I bear with you? Bring him here to me.” ¹⁸ Then Jesus rebuked the demon in the boy and it left him, and from that moment the boy was well.

¹⁹ Afterwards the disciples asked Jesus privately, “Why couldn’t we cast that demon out?”

²⁰ “Because of your little faith,” Jesus told them. “For if you had faith even as small as a tiny mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move!’ and it would go far away. Nothing would be impossible. ²¹ But this kind of demon won’t leave unless you have prayed and gone without food.”^[a]