The earthly and the heavenly harvest

Harvest decorations in Killodiernan Church

Address given at morning worship for the Community of Brendan the Navigator on 13th September 2022

Are you feeling cheerful? I do hope so, because we have so much to give thanks for!

Here in Killodiernan last Sunday we celebrated our Harvest Festival with great joy. Whatever bad news the media are full of, whatever fears we have for the future, we should look at the glass as half full, not half empty! Just reflect for a moment on the breadth and variety of our earthly harvest:

·         We have the staples: we have wheat for bread, barley for beer, oats for porridge, hay for horses and silage for cattle.

·         And there’s so much more than staples for us to enjoy, isn’t there? There’s milk and honey, butter and cheese, beef and pork, lamb and chicken. There are fruits and nuts, blackberries and mushrooms, plums and apples, potatoes and turnips. There are pumpkins and marrows, peas and beans, cabbage and lettuce, and gardens full of flowers!

·         For those who work with animals, there are this year’s foals, and calves and lambs and chicks. And there’s also the fruit of our own bodies - our children and grandchildren born this year, and older ones growing apace as mine are. Thank God for them all!

In this rich corner of the world today, no one will starve because of a poor harvest or recession, as our forefathers so often did. With our God-given cleverness we have invented ways to store food and to transport it, and economic and social systems to distribute it to where it is needed. And if we consume a little less, it will probably be good for our health - and perhaps the whole planet will benefit.

Yet for all our cleverness, the earthly harvest is perishable and uncertain. Why has God not given us perpetually good harvests – and recession free economies? Perhaps to remind us that we are not masters of the universe: God is. God’s laws don’t change. Nature is as God has made it - and what we sow, we shall reap. We remain as we have always been, totally dependent on God’s continuing fatherly goodness.

In the passage from John’sGospel (6:25-35) that we’ve just heard, Jesus asks us to look beyond the earthly harvest, to a different heavenly harvest.

He tells the crowd: ‘Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.’ ‘The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’, he says. And finally he makes this great claim: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whosoever believes in me shall never be thirsty’. 

What is Jesus talking about? This teaching is difficult. I find it so - but then so did many of those who first heard his words, as John tells us in the next few verses. One way to look at it, which I find helpful, is this:

Just as God has made us clever, able to till and keep the world of which we are part, so he has made us in his image to be moral beings, to be souls. Souls with the capacity we call conscience to distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies, love from hate - and to prefer good to evil, as he does. If we use our conscience to make the right choices, we sow a heavenly harvest of good for others to reap, which nourishes us for eternal life. As the old saw says, the good we do lives after us.

But we are not masters of our own souls, any more than we are masters of the universe: our souls are as God made them, with free will, vulnerable to temptation, beset by our own greed. So it’s hard to be good. We have to work at it, just as we do for the earthly harvest. It is hard work resisting temptation, putting what is right above our own desires, cultivating generosity. All too often we fail. We name that sin. And when we fail and sin, the evil we do poisons our soul, and that evil too is eternal – a bad deed done can never be undone!

What a mess we are in! How can we possibly be as good as God wants us to be? As good as God has made us want to be, in our best moments.

This is where Jesus’s teaching speaks to me: he promises us all the help we need to reap the heavenly harvest. All we require is the faith to come to him. As the bread of life, he strengthens our souls. He helps us to resist temptation and to do good. And when we fail, he sucks out the evil that poisons the soul – in other words he redeems us. The only cure for a bad deed is to repent and be forgiven!

It is in this sense that Jesus is the bread of life that nourishes us for eternal life.

So to sum up:

·         Let us thank God our loving Father for bountiful earthly harvests. God makes them possible, and we work hard for them, so it is right to celebrate and enjoy them together.

·         But let us work just as hard for the heavenly harvest of goodness, to nourish our souls.

·         Let us also thank God for the gift of his Son Jesus Christ, whose help we need to reap this heavenly harvest.

·         And let us pray that Jesus will transform our selfish natures into the generous natures on which both our earthly and heavenly harvest bounty depends.

·         If we believe in him, if we come to him, we will never be hungry or thirsty for good things.