Monday 27 July 2026

The Lord said this to me, ‘Go and buy a linen loincloth and put it round your waist. But do not dip it in water.’ And so, as the Lord had ordered, I bought a loincloth and put it round my waist. A second time the word of the Lord was spoken to me, ‘Take the loincloth that you have bought and are wearing round your waist; up! Go to the Euphrates and hide it in a hole in the rock.’ So I went and hid it near the Euphrates as the Lord had ordered me. Many days afterwards the Lord said to me, ‘Get up and go to the Euphrates and fetch the loincloth I ordered you to hide there.’ So I went to the Euphrates, and I searched, and I took the loincloth from the place where I had hidden it. The loincloth was spoilt, good for nothing. Then the word of the Lord was addressed to me, ‘Thus says the Lord: In the same way I will spoil the arrogance of Judah and Jerusalem. This evil people who refuse to listen to my words, who follow the dictates of their own hard hearts, who have followed alien gods, and served them and worshipped them, let them become like this loincloth, good for nothing. For just as a loincloth clings to a man’s waist, so I had intended the whole House of Judah to cling to me – it is the Lord who speaks – to be my people, my glory, my honour and my boast. But they have not listened.’

You have forgotten God, who gave you birth.

You forget the Rock who begot you,

unmindful now of the God who fathered you.

The Lord has seen this, and in his anger

cast off his sons and his daughters.

You have forgotten God, who gave you birth.

‘I shall hide my face from them,’ he says

‘and see what becomes of them.

For they are a deceitful brood,

children with no loyalty in them.

You have forgotten God, who gave you birth.

‘They have roused me to jealousy with what is no god,

they have angered me with their beings of nothing;

I, then, will rouse them to jealousy with what is no people,

I will anger them with an empty‐headed nation.’

You have forgotten God, who gave you birth.

Alleluia, alleluia!

The Father gave us birth by the message of his truth,

that we might be as the first fruits of his creation.

Alleluia!

Jesus put a parable before the crowds: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the biggest shrub of all and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and shelter in its branches.’

He told them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like the yeast a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour till it was leavened all through.’

In all this Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables; indeed, he would never speak to them except in parables. This was to fulfil the prophecy:

I will speak to you in parables

and expound things hidden since the foundation of the world.