Reading 1, Am 8:4-6, 9-12

⁴ Listen to this, you who crush the needy and reduce the oppressed to nothing,

⁵ you who say, 'When will New Moon be over so that we can sell our corn, and Sabbath, so that we can market our wheat? Then, we can make the bushel-measure smaller and the shekel-weight bigger, by fraudulently tampering with the scales.

⁶ We can buy up the weak for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals, and even get a price for the sweepings of the wheat.'

⁹ 'On that Day- declares the Lord Yahweh- I shall make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.

¹⁰ I shall turn your festivals into mourning and all your singing into lamentation; I shall make you all wear sacking round your waists and have all your heads shaved. I shall make it like the mourning for an only child, and it will end like the bitterest of days.

¹¹ 'The days are coming- declares the Lord Yahweh- when I shall send a famine on the country, not hunger for food, not thirst for water, but famine for hearing Yahweh's word.

¹² People will stagger from sea to sea, will wander from the north to the east, searching for Yahweh's word, but will not find it.

Gospel, Mt 9:9-13

⁹ As Jesus was walking on from there he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, 'Follow me.' And he got up and followed him.

¹⁰ Now while he was at table in the house it happened that a number of tax collectors and sinners came to sit at the table with Jesus and his disciples.

¹¹ When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, 'Why does your master eat with tax collectors and sinners?'

¹² When he heard this he replied, 'It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick.

¹³ Go and learn the meaning of the words: Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice. And indeed I came to call not the upright, but sinners.'

September 2010

October 2010