Hi, friends. I'm Annie F. Downs. Let's read the Gospels. The Gospels are the first four books of the New Testament, the Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

These are the stories of Jesus Christ's life on earth, the friendships, the parables, the sacrifices, the meals, the miracles.

Each month we get to read all four books. Make sure you're subscribed and you join us as we read the Gospels together. And invite your friends to join in, particularly this month as we're getting to read the NRSV Catholic Edition.

All of our friends are invited to join us and to listen along, whether you're reading the NRSV or the NRSV Catholic Edition, we are all on the same page.

So here's how this works. I'll read three chapters to you today. You can listen or read along in your own Bible, and then I'll pray, and that's it.

So today is October 3rd, and I'll be reading Mark chapters 7 through 9, and this month I'm reading from the NRSV Catholic Edition.

Mark 7. Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is without washing them.

For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders, and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it.

And there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.

So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders but eat with defiled hands?

He said to them, Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

this people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, and vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.

You abandoned the commandment of God and hold to human tradition. Then he said to them, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition.

For Moses said, honor your father and your mother, and whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.

But you say that if anyone tells father or mother whatever support you might have had for me as Corbin, that is an offering to God, then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on, and you do many things like this.

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, listen to me, all of you, and understand, there is nothing outside a person that by going in a kind of file, but the things that come out are what defile.

When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. He said to them, then do you also fail to understand?

Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile since it enters not the heart, but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer, thus he declared all foods clean.

And he said, it is what comes out of a person that defiles for it is from within from the human heart that evil intentions come for occasion theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.

All these evil things come from within and they defile a person from there he set out and went away to the region of tire.

He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him and she came about down at his feet.

Now the woman was a Gentile of sero Phoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

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