The Readings for October 5th, 2014

First Reading: Isaiah 5:1–7

Let me sing for my beloved

my love-song concerning his vineyard:

My beloved had a vineyard

on a very fertile hill.

  ²He dug it and cleared it of stones,

and planted it with choice vines;

he built a watchtower in the midst of it,

and hewed out a wine vat in it;

he expected it to yield grapes,

but it yielded wild grapes.

  ³And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem

and people of Judah,

judge between me

and my vineyard.

  ⁴What more was there to do for my vineyard

that I have not done in it?

When I expected it to yield grapes,

why did it yield wild grapes?

  ⁵And now I will tell you

what I will do to my vineyard.

I will remove its hedge,

and it shall be devoured;

I will break down its wall,

and it shall be trampled down.

  ⁶I will make it a waste;

it shall not be pruned or hoed,

and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;

I will also command the clouds

that they rain no rain upon it.

  ⁷For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts

is the house of Israel,

and the people of Judah

are his pleasant planting;

he expected justice,

but saw bloodshed;

righteousness,

but heard a cry!

The Word of the Lord

Second Reading: Philippians 3:4b–14

^4b

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:  ⁵circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee;  ⁶as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

⁷Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.  ⁸More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ  ⁹and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.  ¹⁰I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,  ¹¹if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

¹²Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.  ¹³Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,  ¹⁴I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

The Word of the Lord

Gospel: Matthew 21:33–46

³³Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.  ³⁴When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce.  ³⁵But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.  ³⁶Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way.  ³⁷Finally he sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.'  ³⁸But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.'  ³⁹So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.  ⁴⁰Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?"  ⁴¹They said to him, "He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time."

⁴²Jesus said to them, "Have you never read in the scriptures:

'The stone that the builders rejected

has become the cornerstone;

this was the Lord's doing,

and it is amazing in our eyes'?

  ⁴³Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.  ⁴⁴The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls."

⁴⁵When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.  ⁴⁶They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.