Daily Mass Readings for September 01, 2024: Gospel — Mc 7, 1-8. 14-15. 21-23

¹ Now, Israel, pay attention to the statutes and ordinances I am about to teach you, so that you might live and go on to enter and take possession of the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. ² Do not add a thing to what I command you nor subtract from it, so that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I am delivering to you. 6 :¹ Now these are the commandments, statutes, and ordinances that the Lord your God instructed me to teach you so that you may carry them out in the land where you are headed ² and that you may so revere the Lord your God that you will keep all his statutes and commandments that I am giving you—you, your children, and your grandchildren—all your lives, to prolong your days. ³ Pay attention, Israel, and be careful to do this so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in number—as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, said to you, you will have a land flowing with milk and honey. ⁴ Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! ⁵ You must love the Lord your God with your whole mind, your whole being, and all your strength. ⁶ These words I am commanding you today must be kept in mind, ⁷ and you must teach them to your children and speak of them as you sit in your house, as you walk along the road, as you lie down, and as you get up. ⁸ You should tie them as a reminder on your forearm and fasten them as symbols on your forehead. ⁹ Inscribe them on the doorframes of your houses and gates. 1 ⁰ Then when the Lord your God brings you to the land he promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give you—a land with large, fine cities you did not build, 1 ¹ houses filled with choice things you did not accumulate, hewn-out cisterns you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—and you eat your fill, 1 ² be careful not to forget the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, that place of slavery. 1 ³ You must revere the Lord your God, serve him, and take oaths using only his name. 1 ⁴ You must not go after other gods, those of the surrounding peoples, 1 ⁵ for the Lord your God, who is present among you, is a jealous God—his anger will erupt against you and remove you from the land. 1 ⁶ You must not put the Lord your God to the test as you did at Massah. 1 ⁷ Keep his commandments very carefully, as well as the stipulations and statutes he commanded you to observe. 1 ⁸ Do whatever is proper and good before the Lord so that it may go well with you and that you may enter and occupy the good land that he promised your ancestors, 1 ⁹ and that you may drive out all your enemies just as the Lord said. 2 ⁰ When your children ask you later on, “What are the stipulations, statutes, and ordinances that the Lord our God commanded you?” 2 ¹ you must say to them, “We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt in a powerful way. 2 ² And he brought signs and great, devastating wonders on Egypt, on Pharaoh, and on his whole family before our very eyes. 2 ³ He delivered us from there so that he could give us the land he had promised our ancestors. 2 ⁴ The Lord commanded us to obey all these statutes and to revere him so that it may always go well for us and he may preserve us, as he has to this day. 2 ⁵ We will be innocent if we carefully keep all these commandments before the Lord our God, just as he demands.” 7 :¹ When the Lord your God brings you to the land that you are going to occupy and forces out many nations before you—Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and powerful than you— ² and he delivers them over to you and you attack them, you must utterly annihilate them. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy! ³ You must not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, ⁴ for they will turn your sons away from me to worship other gods. Then the anger of the Lord will erupt against you and he will quickly destroy you. ⁵ Instead, this is what you must do to them: You must tear down their altars, shatter their sacred pillars, cut down their sacred Asherah poles, and burn up their idols. ⁶ For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. He has chosen you to be his people, prized above all others on the face of the earth. ⁷ It is not because you were more numerous than all the other peoples that the Lord favored and chose you—for in fact you were the least numerous of all peoples. ⁸ Rather it is because of his love for you and his faithfulness to the promise he solemnly vowed to your ancestors that the Lord brought you out with great power, redeeming you from the place of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. ⁹ So realize that the Lord your God is the true God, the faithful God who keeps covenant faithfully with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, 1 ⁰ but who pays back those who hate him as they deserve and destroys them. He will not ignore those who hate him but will repay them as they deserve! 1 ¹ So keep the commandments, statutes, and ordinances that I today am commanding you to do. 1 ² If you obey these ordinances and are careful to do them, the Lord your God will faithfully keep covenant with you as he promised your ancestors. 1 ³ He will love and bless you, and make you numerous. He will bless you with many children, with the produce of your soil, your grain, your new wine, your olive oil, the offspring of your oxen, and the young of your flocks in the land that he promised your ancestors to give you. 1 ⁴ You will be blessed beyond all peoples; there will be no barrenness among you or your livestock. 1 ⁵ The Lord will protect you from all sickness, and you will not experience any of the terrible diseases that you knew in Egypt; instead he will inflict them on all those who hate you. 1 ⁶ You must destroy all the people whom the Lord your God is about to deliver over to you; you must not pity them or worship their gods, for that will be a snare to you. 1 ⁷ If you think, “These nations are more numerous than I—how can I dispossess them?” 1 ⁸ you must not fear them. You must carefully recall what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and all Egypt, 1 ⁹ the great judgments you saw, the signs and wonders, the strength and power by which he brought you out—thus the Lord your God will do to all the people you fear. 2 ⁰ Furthermore, the Lord your God will release hornets among them until the very last ones who hide from you perish. 2 ¹ You must not tremble in their presence, for the Lord your God, who is present among you, is a great and awesome God. 2 ² He, the God who leads you, will expel the nations little by little. You will not be allowed to destroy them all at once lest the wild animals overrun you. 2 ³ The Lord your God will give them over to you; he will throw them into a great panic until they are destroyed. 2 ⁴ He will hand over their kings to you, and you will erase their very names from memory. Nobody will be able to resist you until you destroy them. 2 ⁵ You must burn the images of their gods, but do not covet the silver and gold that covers them so much that you take it for yourself and thus become ensnared by it; for it is abhorrent to the Lord your God. 2 ⁶ You must not bring any abhorrent thing into your house and thereby become an object of divine wrath along with it. You must absolutely detest and abhor it, for it is an object of divine wrath. 8 :¹ You must keep carefully all these commandments I am giving you today so that you may live, increase in number, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised to your ancestors. ² Remember the whole way by which he has brought you these 4 ⁰ years through the wilderness so that he might, by humbling you, test you to see if you have it within you to keep his commandments or not. ³ So he humbled you by making you hungry and then feeding you with unfamiliar manna. He did this to teach you that humankind cannot live by bread alone, but also by everything that comes from the Lord’s mouth. ⁴ Your clothing did not wear out nor did your feet swell all these 4 ⁰ years. ⁵ Be keenly aware that just as a parent disciplines his child, so the Lord your God disciplines you. ⁶ So you must keep his commandments, live according to his standards, and revere him. ⁷ For the Lord your God is bringing you to a good land, a land of brooks, springs, and fountains flowing forth in valleys and hills, ⁸ a land of wheat, barley, vines, fig trees, and pomegranates, of olive trees and honey, ⁹ a land where you may eat food in plenty and find no lack of anything, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper. 1 ⁰ You will eat your fill and then praise the Lord your God because of the good land he has given you. 1 ¹ Be sure you do not forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments, ordinances, and statutes that I am giving you today. 1 ² When you eat your fill, when you build and occupy good houses, 1 ³ when your cattle and flocks increase, when you have plenty of silver and gold, and when you have abundance of everything, 1 ⁴ be sure you do not feel self-important and forget the Lord your God who brought you from the land of Egypt, the place of slavery, 1 ⁵ and who brought you through the great, fearful wilderness of venomous serpents and scorpions, an arid place with no water. He made water flow from a flint rock and 1 ⁶ fed you in the wilderness with manna (which your ancestors had never before known) so that he might by humbling you test you and eventually bring good to you. 1 ⁷ Be careful not to say, “My own ability and skill have gotten me this wealth.” 1 ⁸ You must remember the Lord your God, for he is the one who gives ability to get wealth; if you do this he will confirm his covenant that he made by oath to your ancestors, even as he has to this day. 1 ⁹ Now if you forget the Lord your God at all and follow other gods, worshiping and prostrating yourselves before them, I testify to you today that you will surely be annihilated. 2 ⁰ Just like the nations the Lord is about to destroy from your sight, so he will do to you because you would not obey him.

1 ⁷ All generous giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or the slightest hint of change. 1 ⁸ By his sovereign plan he gave us birth through the message of truth, that we would be a kind of firstfruits of all he created. ¹ From James, a slave of God and the Lord Jesus Christ, to the 1 ² tribes dispersed abroad. Greetings! ² My brothers and sisters, consider it nothing but joy when you fall into all sorts of trials, ³ because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. ⁴ And let endurance have its perfect effect, so that you will be perfect and complete, not deficient in anything. ⁵ But if anyone is deficient in wisdom, he should ask God, who gives to all generously and without reprimand, and it will be given to him. ⁶ But he must ask in faith without doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed around by the wind. ⁷ For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord, ⁸ since he is a double-minded individual, unstable in all his ways. ⁹ Now the believer of humble means should take pride in his high position. 1 ⁰ But the rich person’s pride should be in his humiliation because he will pass away like a wildflower in the meadow. 1 ¹ For the sun rises with its heat and dries up the meadow; the petal of the flower falls off and its beauty is lost forever. So also the rich person in the midst of his pursuits will wither away. 1 ² Happy is the one who endures testing because when he has proven to be genuine, he will receive the crown of life that God promised to those who love him. 1 ³ Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one. 1 ⁴ But each one is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desires. 1 ⁵ Then when desire conceives, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is full grown, it gives birth to death. 1 ⁶ Do not be led astray, my dear brothers and sisters. 1 ⁹ Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters! Let every person be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger. 2 ⁰ For human anger does not accomplish God’s righteousness. 2 ¹ So put away all filth and evil excess and humbly welcome the message implanted within you, which is able to save your souls. 2 ² But be sure you live out the message and do not merely listen to it and so deceive yourselves. 2 ³ For if someone merely listens to the message and does not live it out, he is like someone who gazes at his own face in a mirror. 2 ⁴ For he gazes at himself and then goes out and immediately forgets what sort of person he was. 2 ⁵ But the one who peers into the perfect law of liberty and fixes his attention there, and does not become a forgetful listener but one who lives it out—he will be blessed in what he does. 2 ⁶ If someone thinks he is religious yet does not bridle his tongue, and so deceives his heart, his religion is futile. 2 ⁷ Pure and undefiled religion before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their adversity and to keep oneself unstained by the world.