“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”: why we read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Scriptures
Luke 4:16-21
“He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him.” [1]
Across the globe on this Sunday, in a vast array of languages, Christians of all the various traditions are doing what we have just done - reading the Scriptures.
Indeed, it is what The King and the Pope did on Thursday past, when they shared in prayer, a wonderful sign of Christian unity.
Reading the Scriptures is what Christians do when we gather for public worship. And it is what we have done across the centuries. One of the earliest descriptions of Christian worship outside the New Testament was written by a Christian thinker called Justin, around the year 150AD - just over a century after the death and resurrection of Jesus, and perhaps about 70 years after the last books of the New Testament had been written.
This is how Justin begins his description of Christian worship: “On the day called Sunday there is a gathering together in the same place of all who live in a given city or rural district. The memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits”. [2]
Across the globe, across the Christian traditions, across the centuries, from the beginning, it is what Christians do when we gather for worship - we read the Scriptures.
Why? Why do we read the Scriptures? Our answer begins by saying that we do it because this is what we see Jesus doing. We read the Scriptures because in doing so - as today’s Gospel reading shows - we are following the example of Jesus: “He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him”.
To be a faithful Christian means to follow in the way of Christ - and this means to read the Scriptures.
It is something we see throughout the Gospels. Close to the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus is tempted by Satan in the wilderness, he responds each time with the words “It is written”, and then quotes the Scriptures. At the very end of Luke’s Gospel, the Risen Christ, meets with the disciples. He says to them, “Thus it is written …”, pointing to the scriptures of the Old Testament to explain the meaning of His death and resurrection.
We read the Scriptures because we see in Jesus Himself that it is integral to following in the way of Christ, to being a Christian. To not read the Scriptures is to not follow in the way of Christ.
After telling us that Jesus was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, Luke in our gospel reading says: “He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me …’”.
Jesus here shows what it means to read the Scriptures. It is not like reading for entertainment, or to fill time, or to distract us. We are to read the Scriptures with attentiveness and devotion. As the collect for this Bible Sunday says, we are to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them”. [3]
When Jesus was, in the synagogue at Nazareth, handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, “he found the place where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me …’”. Such scrolls were not divided up into chapters and verses - that system would not emerge for many centuries. It was not a case of Jesus simply turning to Isaiah chapter 61.
Knowing where to find the place, without help of chapter or verse, where the prophet Isaiah had written “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me”, Jesus is demonstrating how we are to approach Scripture: how we are to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them”. The Scriptures cannot be a foreign or lost world to us. We must inhabit them, dwell in them, be rooted in them.
This means that in addition to reading the Scriptures together when we assemble each Sunday for public worship, we are also encouraged to read them by ourselves: this is a means of us inhabiting the Scriptures, dwelling in them, being rooted in them.
There are different ways of doing this. At the back of the church, we have material from the Bible Reading Fellowship, which aids daily reading of Scripture. A cycle of daily Bible reading can be found on the Church of Ireland website or provided online by other organisations. If we want to read through a particular book of the Bible by ourselves - perhaps one of the gospels - there are guides that can help us. Again, the Bible Reading Fellowship provides good material for this. [4]
And, of course, to do this we need a Bible. If we don’t have one, we get one. And we will not be alone in doing this. According to the publishing house SPCK, UK sales of the Bible increased by over 100% between 2019 and 2024. [5] That suggests a desire to reconnect with Christianity. And we are part of this, when we as a congregation and as individuals “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the Scriptures.
In our gospel reading, Luke tells us what happened after Jesus had read the passage from the prophet Isaiah: “And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’”.
This is what the Scriptures do - they focus us, as the Church and as Christians, on Jesus Christ. He is the One who in Whom the writings of the Law and Prophets of the Old Testament are fulfilled. He is the One proclaimed in the Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament. It is in reading the Scriptures that we encounter Jesus Christ, the One in whose life, teaching, miracles, death, and resurrection is revealed the grace, love, mercy, and truth of God.
Take the Scriptures away, or set them to the side, or stop paying attention to them, and the life of the Church and of the Christian inevitably loses its way. This is why, each and every time we assemble for worship in our parish church, we read the Scriptures: because, as a church, they centre us on and root us in Christ. And it is why we are to read the scriptures in our own lives, that daily living may be centred on and rooted in Christ.
I recently came across a description by a commentator on political and cultural affairs, formerly an atheist, of how he embraced Christian faith in adult life: “I actually read the New Testament, which I’d never bothered to do before. I found it incredibly moving: it felt like reading something dimly forgotten but curiously familiar, a great inheritance that had been hidden away”. [6]
The Scriptures are our great inheritance, but not hidden away. We gather around them week by week in our parish church. We are called to read them in daily life. We read the Scriptures because we follow in the way of Christ; because, after His example, we are to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them; because it is by the truth, grace, hope, and wisdom the Scriptures proclaim, that we are guided, sustained, and renewed in the faith of Jesus Christ.
__________
[1] From the gospel reading appointed for Bible Sunday - Luke 4:16-24 - permitted as an alternative to that of the Fifth Sunday before Advent, BCP 2004 p.70.
[2] From Justin Marty's First Apology (67).
[3] The collect of Bible Sunday is also that of the Fifth Sunday before Advent. BCP 2004 thankfully allows it to be used as the Order One (traditional language) collect for the Second Sunday in Advent, its traditional, familiar place for Anglicans - BCP 2004 p.297 and p.242.
[4] See, for example, BRF's 'Really Useful Guides'.
[5] "At SPCK Publishing, we've witnessed numerous cultural shifts throughout our rich 327-year history, but none quite as striking as the recent surge in Bible sales" - SPCK statement, March 2025.
[6] George Owers, 'On first going to church', The Critic, 27.08.25.
The icon is Ivanka Demchuk's 'Christ'.
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