Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

The Rich and the Kingdom of God

Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.

“Which of the two did what his father wanted?” “The first,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.

“Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.

They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are.

“Caesar’s,” they replied. Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.

But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you,

‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’

And anyone who swears by heaven swears by God’s throne and by the one who sits on it.

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

and declared, “This fellow said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days.’”

But Jesus remained silent. The high priest said to him, “I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God.”

and saying, “You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!”

He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”

About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” ).

When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”

John the Baptist Prepares the Way

The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God,