The Biblical writers certainly know how to tell a good story.  Once you have become acclimatised to their perspectives, they make compelling reading.  The Year of Scripture gave me the fillip I needed to re-engage with the Bible more fully once more. What I realised I was missing was regularly renewing that overview of the Bible’s grand vistas which only comes when we give dedicated time to daily read whole chapters in a reasonably sequential way.  

The readings I’ve been recommending on the bulletin, one from the Old Testament and one from the New, are as much for my benefit as anyone else’s.  If you’ve been following them too, you will have made quite some progress by now.  In the first reading each day you will have read most of Genesis and be progressing well into Exodus.  In the second reading you will by now have got virtually to the end of St Mark’s Gospel.

“Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ,” declared St Jerome.  There is no need for it any longer.  The Church long ago repented of its decision after the Reformation to discourage the laity from reading them.  Now it is very much encouraged by the Pope himself.  He recommends carrying a slim copy of a Gospel in our pockets and finding some time to read it each day. And there are plentiful aids now to help us in our understanding of the Bible.  I could recommend William Niel’s One Volume Bible Commentary as an approachable classic from which anyone could benefit.  For those who want to go into things in depth, gleaning the harvest of modern scholarship, The Oxford Bible Commentary is very sound.

MICHAEL KIRKHAM