Invitation
May I draw your attention to
the daily reading of the Gospel
This invitation wants to share with you the joy
of the Gospel. Everyone, without exception
can experience that joy by opening his or her heart
to the healing power of the Word of God.
Available every day
Consideration
To love God and to love one’s neighbour as oneself is above all fire and disaster. So spoke the Scribe yesterday. All of today’s texts continue that thought, which should govern our fasting. Hosea says: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and love of God more than burnt offerings”. The famous Psalm 51 goes on to say: “What I sacrifice, God, is my penance; a crushed and humbled heart you do not reject”. The Gospel illustrates it in the attitude of the tax collector: “God, have mercy on me a sinner”. It is our confession of guilt, every day. Kyrie, eleison.
FIRST READING Hos. 6, 1-6
I want mercy, not sacrifice
From the prophet Hosea
Thus speaks the Lord:
“In their misery
my people will seek me from the morning light
and say:
“Come, let us return to the Lord ;
He has torn us, he will heal us;
He has wounded us, He will bind them up.
“At the end of two days He makes us alive again,
on the third day He makes us rise again
To live again before His face.
“We want to love the Lord
To strive to know Him.
“And surely as the dawn He shows Himself,
“he comes upon us as the rain,
“like the spring rain that waters the earth.
“What shall I begin with you, Ephraim?
“What shall I begin with you, Judah?
“Your mercy is like the morning mist,
like the dew that disappears early in the morning.
“Therefore I have struck you through the prophets,
I have brought death by the words of my mouth:
My judgment broke in like light.
“For I desire mercy, not sacrifices
and the love of God more than burnt offerings”.
INTERLUDIUM Ps. 51(50), 3-4, 18-19, 20-21ab
In love I delight, and not in burnt offerings
(Hos. 6:6).
God, be merciful to me in your mercy,
deliver me from my sinfulness in your mercy.
Wash my guilt from me utterly
cleanse me from all my sins.
You have no pleasure in gifts.
What I offer you, you do not want.
What I offer, God, is my penance,
a crushed and humiliated heart that You do not reject.
Be merciful again to Zion also in Your goodness,
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
Then you will receive all the sacrifices you have commanded,
then they will come again to sacrifice on Your altar.
VERSE FOR THE GOSPEL Am. 5, 14
Seek good and not evil
that you may live and that God may dwell with you.
GOSPEL Lk. 18, 9-14
The tax collector returns home justified, but not the Pharisee.
From the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to
Luke
At that time, Jesus said, in view of some who were
– convinced of their own righteousness –
despised others,
the following parable:
“Two people went up to the temple to pray,
One was a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
“The Pharisee stood with his head held high
and prayed to himself as follows
God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of the people,
thieves, unjust, adulterers,
nor like that tax collector over there.
I fast twice a week
and I give a tithe of all my income.
“But the tax collector kept at a distance
and did not even raise his eyes to heaven ;
But he slapped his chest and said :
God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
“I say to you:
This one went home justified and that one did not ;
For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled.
but he who humbles himself will be exalted”.
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Laudato Si
Encyclic of
POPE FRANCIS
On Care for the Common Home
221. Several convictions of our faith, developed at the beginning of this encyclical, contribute to enriching the meaning of this conversion, such as the awareness that every creature reflects something of God and has a message to convey to us, or the certainty that Christ has taken this material world into himself and now, risen, dwells in the innermost being of every creature, surrounding it with his affection and penetrating it with his light. As well as the recognition that God has created the world and has inscribed in it an order and a dynamism that human beings have no right to ignore. When we read in the Gospel that Jesus speaks of the birds and says that “God certainly does not forget any of them” (Lk 12,6), are we capable of treating them badly and harming them? I invite all Christians to make this dimension of their own conversion explicit, making it clear that the strength and light of the grace they have received extends to their relationship with other creatures and with the world around them, establishing the exalted fraternity with all creation that St. Francis of Assisi lived so luminously.
Continued on
The biblical text in this issue is taken from The New Translation of the Bible,
Dutch Bible Society 2004/2007.
Considerations of the liturgical suggestions for the week and on Sunday
Laudato Si Official English translation
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