Bible Sunday 2026

(Matthew 24: 30 – 35)

A good book can be very restorative, can’t it? A thriller can draw you into a plot which holds your attention until the last page. A novel can take you into the complex emotions and moods of human beings. Other books can teach us something new about the world or others make us laugh.

Today the last Sunday after Trinity is often known as Bible Sunday, when we celebrate the gift of the Bible, often described as a library of books. For some Christians, this description is tricky as we fear it lessens what the Bible has to reveal to us about who God is and how God acts. For others of us, the challenge is that the Bible narrates stories of violence which do not sit easily with our faith in God or our sense of mercy. Yet for others still, the fact that the Bible speaks into so many of the human situations which we encounter actually deepens our faith in God. For at its very best, the Bible narrates to us a love story of a long-suffering God who goes to extraordinary lengths to love people who often don’t want to be loved and to seek their renewal and flourishing.

Today, the day when we celebrate the Bible, the Word of God we hear in our Gospel reading “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24: 35).

True words indeed as we think back over time as the world has changed. Nations have risen and fallen. Battles have been fought. People have tolerated or not. Ink quills and vellum have been replaced by modern forms of paper and print press technology and fast mass production. Technology has meant the written word has become ever more accessible to everyone. Through the centuries the Bible, and its words have been passed down to us and survived whatever the worlds challenges.

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away”

So - job done, we might think; the word of God, is in everyone’s hands, accessible to all.

But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Having access to a Bible is one thing; reading it and understanding it is quite another, and in some ways the production of one volume, printed Bibles as we know them can complicate the way we read it, and bring its own problems.

I think that is partly because it was never really intended to be a book at all. The Latin word from which we get Bible was Biblia, and it meant library, not book. It’s not meant to be one story but lots of stories. Many different types of writing – poetry, history, law, prophecy, folk tales – all written to be read in different ways. Joining the Scriptures into one volume makes them seem, literally, black and white, static, fixed.  It gives the impression too, that the Bible tells one unified story, as if written by one hand, at one moment. That it will be internally consistent and always say the same thing, and the Bible just isn’t like that. It is the record of many different people wrestling with their faith, glimpsing God, struggling to work out what it means to live as the people of God. It isn’t a book. It is many books. Many voices, many viewpoints, some of them in conversation, or even argument with each other. The Bible doesn’t always even agree with itself. That’s why for example it has been used to justify slavery and to inspire the campaign against it. Or it has been used to oppress women but has also encouraged them with stories of people who went against the grain of their society and found new ways to live and to love.

The diversity of voices in the Bible are its strength and beauty, but they call us to be brave when we read it, to give up our longing for simple answers to complicated questions. They call us to look through it as well as at it, and most of all, to be alert to the moments when we feel the breath of God coming from its pages.  

So I think it is really important how we read it. It isn’t God. We mustn’t put the Bible on a pedestal and worship it. Whenever we read it we need to ask not, “What does the Bible say?” but “what might God be saying to me, today, through the Bible”. Our collect for today, tells us to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” – and it’s that last bit that really makes the difference. Undigested food just produces pain; undigested Bible texts do the same. Digestion takes time, but eventually - we are what we eat – it nourishes and shapes us, giving us life.

There are many ways of reading the Bible which encourage digestion. Something that works for me, that helps me to slow down and engage with the Bible with the whole of myself is to remind myself to read it with my head, my heart and my hands.

Firstly we read with our heads. We ask what the context is of what we are reading. What’s happening, who wrote it, why, for whom, when? We ask factual questions of it. Who are these people? Where are these places?

Secondly we read with our hearts. What do we feel about what we are reading? What happens when we imagine ourselves in the story? Where does it comfort us, or challenge us and why? What bells does it ring with us? What experiences of our own does it touch on?

And finally, we read with our hands. What response does it call for from us? Does it mean prayer, or action, change in our own lives.

The head, the heart and the hands…  It might just help us to engage honestly with what we hear and read.  What really matters I think, is that we start out with the expectation that we will discover God in the scriptures. That we will encounter the living Word, not simply the words on the page. The living word that stays while heaven and earth pass away.

So on this Bible Sunday I think we need to see the Bible as a wonderful treasury of wisdom and of folly, inviting us to find ourselves within its ancient stories of love and hatred, of joy and despair, but inspiring us , too, to be part of the story God is telling now, through our lives.

So I wonder what God might be saying to you through the Bible today?

Amen