Mass Readings

Thursday after Ash Wednesday, (commemoration of Saint Polycarp, Bishop, Martyr)

First reading

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Moses said to the people: ‘See, today I set before you life and prosperity, death and disaster. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin on you today, if you love the Lord your God and follow his ways, if you keep his commandments, his laws, his customs, you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to make your own. But if your heart strays, if you refuse to listen, if you let yourself be drawn into worshipping other gods and serving them, I tell you today, you will most certainly perish; you will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today: I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live, in the love of the Lord your God, obeying his voice, clinging to him; for in this your life consists, and on this depends your long stay in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob he would give them.’

Psalm or canticle

Psalm 1:1-4,6

Happy indeed is the man
 who follows not the counsel of the wicked;
nor lingers in the way of sinners
 nor sits in the company of scorners,
but whose delight is the law of the Lord
 and who ponders his law day and night.

He is like a tree that is planted
 beside the flowing waters,
that yields its fruit in due season
 and whose leaves shall never fade;
 and all that he does shall prosper.

Not so are the wicked, not so!
For they like winnowed chaff
 shall be driven away by the wind.
for the Lord guards the way of the just
 but the way of the wicked leads to doom.
*Happy the man who has placed his trust in the Lord.
*Anyone who follows you, O Lord, will have the light of life.
*Try to imitate God, as children of his that he loves.
*Those who prove victorious I will feed from the tree of life.
*His delight is the law of the Lord.
or
Happy the man who has placed his trust in the Lord.
or
The just will flourish like the palm-tree in the courts of our God.

Gospel

Luke 9:22-25

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘The Son of Man is destined to suffer grievously, to be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and to be put to death, and to be raised up on the third day.’
Then to all he said, ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, that man will save it. What gain, then, is it for a man to have won the whole world and to have lost or ruined his very self?’

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