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The Liturgy of the Word -- First reading

Friday, September 26, 2025Faith

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In a sense ... the Gospel reading selects the Old Testament reading, and so we literally jump around through the Old Testament on Sundays.

Father Robert M.
O'Grady

The shared testament that we Catholics have with our Jewish sisters and brothers, we dub the "Old Testament." It is from that series of books that we draw the first reading at Sunday Mass throughout the liturgical year, except for the Easter season, when, "according to the ancient custom of the church, the Old Testament is not proclaimed" and the first reading is from the Acts of the Apostles.
A few things to note about the Old Testament readings:
They are, for the most part, shorter than the second reading or the Gospel. The books of the Old Testament tend to be longer, and they narrate for us the often tedious and trying sojourn of Israel to the promised land.
The selections are chosen because they have some relationship, sometimes obvious and sometimes not so much, to the Gospel of the day.
During the weekdays, however, the first reading is always semi-continuous, whether from an Old Testament or New Testament book.
The second readings are semi-continuous, that is they start near the beginning of an apostolic letter and go forward for a few weeks (more on this when we come to the second reading) and Gospel readings are continuous, which begin at First Sunday of Advent and go through the end of the Liturgical Year, with a few interruptions, especially in the Easter and Christmas seasons.
In a sense, then, the Gospel reading selects the Old Testament reading, and so we literally jump around through the Old Testament on Sundays.

The dilemma is that we lose much of the sense of the whole of an Old Testament book because we have a limited context. On the other hand, the editors of the Lectionary wanted us to have a sense of the connection between both testaments.
An overarching desire for the expansion of the Lectionary was to make more of Sacred Scripture more widely available to us when it is proclaimed at Sunday Mass. Providing selections serves several purposes at Mass, but it also invites us to seek out more by returning to our own Bibles during the week at home and to see how and where a particular "snippet" from, say, the Book of Exodus, fits into the whole Book of Exodus.
Selections could have been longer and in some cases better chosen, or even done in a semi-continuous reading. But the revision commission was also aware that the readings were all part of a whole liturgical event -- the Mass. Therefore, they needed to be attentive to the reality of the attention span of the assembly and that there would be other readings as well.
Readings from the prophets predominate throughout the year, followed by readings from the law and the historical books.
Here are some numbers to demonstrate the point:
Even with the expanded selection of Old Testament texts, only 932 verses of the 25,044 verses in the Roman Catholic version of the Bible are in our Lectionary. Keep in mind that this does not include the Psalms, which we address next week.
The law or Torah contains 5,853 verses, the Lectionary selects 322; the historical books weigh in at 9,186 verses with 134 selected; the wisdom books have 4,130, we hear 129; and the prophets have 5,875 verses, and we get a glimpse with 347.
These numbers tell us how much treasure remains unproclaimed at Sunday Mass from the Old Testament and, therefore, how much "homework" we have during the week to fill in those sometimes-glaring holes.
The Old Testament can sometimes be challenging and, more than a few times, surprising. Challenging because we see the human and societal problems of the people of Israel, some brought on by themselves and others brought on by outside forces, and they can remind us, often uncomfortably so, about similar circumstances for individuals and nations, seemingly repeating the same mistakes generation after generation.
We can be surprised with the people of Israel about God's mercy towards them in the face of their sins. Their endless struggles, both personal and societal, to get it right, and how they surprise themselves when they get it right, and things seem to settle down so they can indeed be the people of God. How they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and vice versa.
God promised to be Israel's God, and he asked them to be his people. They agreed and found out that it carried great responsibility.
We are God's people, and even the brief Old Testament readings we have on Sunday place that challenge before us and invite our response.