Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

95 Oh, come, let us sing to the Lord! Give a joyous shout in honor of the Rock of our salvation!

² Come before him with thankful hearts. Let us sing him psalms of praise. ³ For the Lord is a great God, the great King of^[a] all gods. ⁴ He controls the formation of the depths of the earth and the mightiest mountains; all are his. ⁵ He made the sea and formed the land; they too are his. ⁶ Come, kneel before the Lord our Maker, ⁷ for he is our God. We are his sheep, and he is our Shepherd. Oh, that you would hear him calling you today and come to him!

⁸ Don’t harden your hearts as Israel did in the wilderness^[b] at Meribah and Massah. ⁹ For there your fathers doubted me, though they had seen so many of my miracles before. My patience was severely tried by their complaints. ¹⁰ “For forty years I watched them in disgust,” the Lord God says. “They were a nation whose thoughts and heart were far away from me. They refused to accept my laws. ¹¹ Therefore, in mighty wrath I swore that they would never enter the Promised Land, the place of rest I planned for them.”

²⁷ But some of the people went out anyway to gather food, even though it was the Sabbath, but there wasn’t any.

^28-29 “How long will these people refuse to obey?” the Lord asked Moses. “Don’t they realize that I am giving them twice as much on the sixth day, so that there will be enough for two days? For the Lord has given you the seventh day as a day of Sabbath rest; stay in your tents and don’t go out to pick up food from the ground that day.” ³⁰ So the people rested on the seventh day.

³¹ And the food became known as “manna” (meaning “What is it?”); it was white, like coriander seed, and flat, and tasted like honey bread.

³² Then Moses gave them this further instruction from the Lord: they were to take two quarts of it to be kept as a museum specimen forever, so that later generations could see the bread the Lord had fed them in the wilderness, when he brought them from Egypt. ³³ Moses told Aaron to get a container and put two quarts of manna in it and to keep it in a sacred place from generation to generation. ³⁴ Aaron did this, just as the Lord had instructed Moses, and eventually it was kept in the Ark in the Tabernacle.

³⁵ So the people of Israel ate the manna forty years until they arrived in the land of Canaan, where there were crops to eat.

4 ^1-2 When the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard about the greater crowds coming to him than to John to be baptized and to become his disciples—(though Jesus himself didn’t baptize them, but his disciples did)— ³ he left Judea and returned to the province of Galilee.

⁴ He had to go through Samaria on the way, ^5-6 and around noon as he approached the village of Sychar, he came to Jacob’s Well, located on the parcel of ground Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jesus was tired from the long walk in the hot sun and sat wearily beside the well.