Daily Reading for Monday, July 29th, 2024

Reading 1, Jeremiah 13:1-11

¹ Yahweh said this to me, 'Go and buy a linen waistcloth and put it round your waist. But do not dip it in water.'

² And so, as Yahweh had ordered, I bought a waistcloth and put it round my waist.

³ A second time the word of Yahweh came to me,

⁴ 'Take the waistcloth that you have bought and are wearing round your waist. Up, go to the Euphrates and hide it there in a hole in the rock.'

⁵ So I went and hid it by the Euphrates as Yahweh had ordered me.

⁶ A long time later, Yahweh said to me, 'Up, go to the Euphrates and fetch the waistcloth I ordered you to hide there.'

⁷ So I went to the Euphrates, and I searched, and I took the waistcloth from the place where I had hidden it. And there was the waistcloth ruined, no use for anything.

⁸ Then the word of Yahweh was addressed to me as follows,

⁹ 'Yahweh says this, "In the same way I shall ruin the pride of Judah, the immense pride of Jerusalem.

¹⁰ This evil people, these people who refuse to listen to my words, who follow their own stubborn inclinations and run after other gods, serving and worshipping them -- this people will become like this waistcloth, no good for anything.

¹¹ For just as a waistcloth clings to a man's waist, so I made the whole House of Israel and the whole House of Judah cling to me, Yahweh declares, to be my people, my glory, my honour and my pride. But they have not listened."

Responsorial Psalm, Deuteronomy 32:18-19, 20, 21

¹⁸ (You forget the Rock who fathered you, the God who made you, you no longer remember.)

¹⁹ Yahweh saw it and, in anger, he spurned his sons and daughters.

²⁰ 'I shall hide my face from them,' he said, 'and see what will become of them. For they are a deceitful brood, children with no loyalty in them.

²¹ They have roused me to jealousy with a non-god, they have exasperated me with their idols. In my turn I shall rouse them to jealousy with a non-people, I shall exasperate them with a stupid nation.