When I was farming, the work I
liked best was the work of production; which is to say, the kinds of things
people tend to think of when they think of farming—plowing, planting, watering,
weeding, that labor where the focus is on the fertility of the soil and the
growth and health of the crops. Maybe
it’s just because I’m an introvert, but I loved the solitary and contemplative
quality of that work, the long hours alone on the tractor, the still, early
mornings walking through the fields, opening and closing irrigation valves. But inevitably, there came a turning point where
the work would change, where the focus would be on sorting and weighing and
packing and storing. The attention of
the farm would turn outward, to seek buyers, and negotiate prices, and schedule
deliveries.
That turning point was the harvest,
when the crop, that was the fulfillment and culmination of all the months-long
work of production, became the starting point for a whole new kind of work. The harvest is what connected our needs with the
needs of the city. It was where the farm
met the world of commerce, and the market that supplied it with all the things
that it couldn’t produce for itself—seeds, fertilizers, tractor parts, diesel
fuel. The sale of the harvested crop is how
we got the capital for a new cycle of production.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus sets
his face for Jerusalem, and the climax of his mission. He appoints seventy disciples to go, two by
two, before him, to test the readiness of the people for the proclamation and
demonstration of the kingdom of God. And
he impresses upon them the importance of the challenging work they are about to
do, by likening it to the harvest. “The
harvest is plentiful,” he says, but the laborers are few.” The work that Jesus does— his exorcisms and
healings, his teaching of repentance and forgiveness and renewal, his invitation
to outcasts and sinners to feast at the table of the kingdom—the work that he
appoints these disciples to help to carry out, is a culmination and a
fulfillment. It is the harvest of all
that Israel has learned about the authority and the wisdom and the justice, and
goodness and compassion of God.
But the harvest to which Jesus sends
the Seventy is also something new. It is
not just a turning point in their lives or even in the history of Israel--it is
a turning point in the work of God. It
is God’s harvest. “Pray to the Lord of
the harvest,” says Jesus, “to send laborers into his harvest.” It is the
beginning of something new, so it requires laborers who are willing to try a
new way of working that forms a new kind of community. They are to travel empty-handed and depend on
generosity of others. They are to come
as those who offer peace, who trust in the power of peace to turn strangers
into friends. They are to rely on the
name of Jesus, and on the nearness of the kingdom of God.
And to show how profound this
turning point is, what radically-new kinds of relationships will be called for,
how the conventional wisdom about what it means to be God’s people must be discarded;
Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem. But
when he gets there, the labor of the harvest will fall entirely on him. It will get more and more concentrated and
focused and intense until at last it is exhausted in the helplessness of the
cross. The body of Jesus, like a seed, will be laid
in the tomb. And it is there, where all
the work of human production is swallowed up in the abyss of silence and
stillness that is God, that the full abundance of the harvest will begin to be
revealed.
I always knew, when I was farming,
that the crops that we grew were for feeding people, but that remained kind of
abstract for me as long as we were chiefly selling to restaurants and wholesale
distributors. I would walk down to the
fields in pitch darkness and take boxes of produce from the refrigerator and
load them on a flatbed truck and drive to San Francisco, and stack them at back
doors and loading docks at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning. But then we started doing more and more retail
sales at farmers’ markets. It was there
that I got to see people’s faces light up when they saw the banner with the
name of our farm. I got to hear their murmurs
of delight at the variety of textures and colors of the lettuces and
potatoes. They would ask questions about
how to prepare the food, and tell me about who was coming to dinner, and I started
to truly understand how the harvest of the farm was shared with the world, how it
passed into the hands of strangers to become the stuff of family and community,
far from the fields where it grew.
The harvest of the gospel spread in
the 1st Century world, where new urban communities were forming, made
up of a cosmopolitan, highly mobile people, dislocated from their roots in the
tribe and on the land. They were people hungry
for a deeper encounter with God than was offered by the smorgasbord of pagan
cults and exotic mystery religions. They were drawn to the religion of the Jews,
to its moral seriousness and curious mix of mythic profundity and historical
realism. But they required a new way of
being Israel, one that they could share with fellow citizens of this strange
and unsettling new world. And they found
that way through the Apostles of Jesus the Christ, the Messiah of Israel, and
the story of his life, and his cross and resurrection. It was a story that awakened in them a spirit of
faith, reverence, and devotion, and the power to lay aside old prejudices and
superstitions and to live together in loving service to others, in a manner such
as they had ever known before.
And this context explains why Paul
is so adamant that the gentiles in the church in Galatia should not undergo a
formal conversion to Judaism. It would
be as if there were a field full of ripe grain, and you drove into it and
started to plow. Still, every
generation of Christians seems to need to remember for itself not to keep toiling
at the work of production when it’s time to bring in the harvest. We still make the law of love a religion of
rules, so we can tell for ourselves who’s in and who’s out. We still seem to think that the Christian
people are a tribe, with a homeland to defend, and enemies to vanquish. We still want a God high above, whom we’ll
meet when we’re dead, and not one who seeks us and speaks to us every moment,
as close as breath, as plain as bread.
But there’s no way to go back and
fix our mistakes, and there’s no time to waste on regret, because the fields
are still ripe with a plentiful harvest, and laborers are still far too few. If you have a taste for the good things of
the earth, and hate to see them go to waste; if you know abundance when you see
it; if you desire nothing more than to share the gifts of God, and to celebrate
with friends and strangers in the peace of the kingdom; then the Lord of the
harvest still has a job for you.
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