I hate your feasts; do justice and love mercy

thick types still marking it. You will know, you will know, and not with long sweat, the manner of the spiritual worship — how it was always, and from the beginning, thrice-desired by God, but still hard to enter and untouchable for the souls of the Jews. That is why they needed an infant-fitting word, and simple lessons, and an economic child-nursing that had nothing steep or rough. For God legislated even of old the things in types. And he showed beforehand again the things from the true worship as coming and about to be present in their times. And he made the approach through blood, and the shadow, a thing to be thrown away. He shook it off through the prophet, saying in Amos, 'I have hated, I have rejected your feasts, and I will not smell in your assemblies. Because if you bring me whole burnt offerings and your sacrifices, I will not look. Take away from me the noise of your songs, and I will not hear the psalm of your instruments.'

And through Micah he has brought in the person of a man, wanting to learn how he might accomplish the good without blame: 'With what shall I take hold of the Lord, shall I lay hold of God most high? Shall I take hold of him with whole burnt offerings, with yearling calves? Will the Lord receive thousands of rams, or ten thousands of fat goats? Shall I give my firstborn, fruit of my belly for ungodliness, for the sin of my soul?' Then, joined and in order: 'Has it been told you, O man, what is good, or what the Lord seeks from you, but to do judgment and to love mercy, and to be ready to walk with the Lord your God?' Is this not clearly what Christ said: 'If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me'? And again, 'Let the one who loves me follow me, and where I am, there let my servant also be.' Not in the legal worship, the one according to Christ, but in a holy and spiritual one.

Palladius: You have spoken most rightly.

Cyril: And through Isaiah’s voice he rebukes those from Israel more hotly, saying: ‘Hear the word of the Lord, rulers of Sodom; attend to the law of God, people of Gomorrah. What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord. I am full of whole burnt offerings of rams, and I do not want fat of lambs and goats; nor if you come to appear to me — who sought these things from your hands? You shall not go on treading my court. If you bring fine flour, it is vain. Incense is an abomination to me; I cannot endure your new moons and sabbaths and great day. Fasting and idleness and your feasts my soul has hated; you have become a surfeit to me.’ And through the prophet Malachi he says the same still to people greatly hated. And he remembers times in which those throughout all the earth would offer him the incomparable—