Living out the story we live in

Bible Sunday 2026
Leviticus 19.1-2, 15-18; I Thess 2.1-8; Matthew 22.34-46 (Proper 25A)

The human instinct to make a mark on parchment or a page, or on the wall of a cave, is the instinct to capture an idea or a version of events, and to set it down with clarity, even beyond contradiction.

We write things down so as not to forget; to remember the stories that have made us. We gather around, like singers round a score, and in our songs and tales we know who we are. This is why the exiled Jews in Babylon started to write down the myths that made them and the laws that they lived by. It’s why, after the Buddha’s death, his followers met together in council to record his teachings – for accuracy, for study, for chanting. It is why the Gurus of the Sikh tradition recorded their own amalgam of Hindu and Muslim scripture, so that their written texts could be like the presence of an undying final Guru among them, keeping them on the right path.

It was certainly the hope of the Protestant Reformers and translators that an English Bible would put an end to unreliable theology, and deliver into the hands of everyone the clear and incontrovertible word of God, so that it might travel to where it was most needed, accomplishing its divine purposes (Isaiah 55.11). As William Tyndale expressed it, ‘The boy that driveth the plough’ would know more of the scriptures than even the most highfalutin in the land.

Today on Bible Sunday (as the Trinity season ends) we focus on the Word, the Protestant ying to the Catholic yang of Corpus Christi, with its concentration (at the start of Trinitytide) on the Sacrament. Word and Sacrament, Sacrament and Word: always the same inseparable double-act of Christian worship.

That said, the Word is, as it turns out, just as Sacramental as bread and wine. The words on the page – crushed plants turned to pigment and daubed with meaning on a stretched-out sheep’s-hide – these also are a revelation and presence of the living God, supremely when shared together in worship, but also in the Bible prayed-over and open on our lap at home; or explained by scholars in the study-group, or scrolled down in the Bible app that shines brightly on our screens in bed, at table, on the bus.

We are insatiably hungry for God; thirsty for God, like deer that pant for cooling streams; and although we are adept at making do with less than God – with shiny toys, and cakes-and-ale – nothing can ever beat the real thing. Bible Sunday celebrates this fact as much as anything else.

But maybe in this, Houston, we have a problem? For sometimes we think that God will come easily through this straightforward penny-in-the-slot guide to life on earth, penned by God himself, bound in tooled leather, and passed obligingly to us through the clouds, ‘complete with maps’. Indeed, for a time it was fashionable to refer to Scripture as ‘the maker’s manual’, as if it could be used in exactly the same way as those little booklets that tell you what to do when your washing-machine breaks down.

But this morning’s gospel, in which Jesus adjudicates on the greatest of the commandments, suggests that it may not be quite so straightforward. The Pharisees saw that some of the 613 commandments of the Law dealt in serious social matters such as honouring one’s parents; others were basically building or health-and-safety regs, like always putting a handrail round the edge of a new flat roof; others still feel more the country code, like the commandment to shoo away a mother bird before you take from her nest her fledglings or her eggs (Deuteronomy 22.6). How can you find your way through all these different laws, they ask Jesus? Are some of them more important than others? Which is the greatest? What does God say?

Jesus gives a textbook answer. Actually, there is no ‘greatest commandment’ as such. All 613 must be obeyed, the lightest as well as the gravest. But there are those commandments – two of them in fact – which so thoroughly encapsulate all the others that they might be said to be the greatest: ‘love God’ of course; and, on the other side of the same coin, ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. These commandments run through the scriptures like writing through a stick of rock. And all the other books shine a light and comment on them, and tell more chapters of the story.

And the same is true in the New Testament. Whether we are reading about Saint Paul’s various challenges, or the gospel-accounts that tell the same tale in their own particular way, we notice that the Bible is not a single book but a whole library of books; and even just the gospels are not a single portrait of Jesus, but a whole gallery of his portraits, each in a different situation with different people. As one scholar has put it, ‘Scripture is formed by Jesus walking around the land encountering people in conversation and compassion.’

And that’s our job, too, as those who are (as Paul reminds us) ‘entrusted with the message of the gospel’. Drawn in to the story, in all its complexity, by words on a page, we become the people we are called to be. It is by living in the story that we learn to live out the story. And that is where we find God, not conjured by us, but making his own loving presence felt.