When I moved to Big Sandy a little over a decade ago, I understood little to nothing about farming. When friends and neighbors discussed harvest, I didn’t properly grasp all of the implications of that part of the work year. On a few occasions, I’ve helped out with different jobs and experienced the grinding hourly demands. Year after year, I’ve talked to locals about the stress of cutting, equipment repair on the fly, eating while working, watching the weather, and hundreds of other challenges. Add to that the pressure of getting the work done in the window of available time. Harvest is an urgent, single-minded season of intense work. The work barely pauses for anything. On more than one occasion, I’ve done counseling and other pastoral work sitting on a bucket in the cab of an old combine.
Today, harvest is serious business. I’m willing to bet that the further back you go in agricultural history, the more urgent and stressed the work becomes. I can only imagine how intense harvest would’ve been in the 1st century, when everything in the cutting and threshing process was done by hand, often by day laborers if you could afford them, or by the family alone if you couldn’t. I’ve read that in Ancient Israel, between the heat and naturally occurring yeasts, grapes ferment before they are brought in from the fields and go bad fast. Watching the intensity of modern farmers during harvest, with combines that cut and thresh automatically, I can only imagine how much more intensity ancients brought to the work.
The thing is, I’ve known about the harvest work for years, but I’ve never connected it to the many times Jesus used harvest as a metaphor. Recently, while looking at Matthew 9:37-38, the significance of harvest jumped out at me. “Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” He said these words after a season of teaching and preaching. They were a reaction to the intense need he saw in those he encountered. Matthew described the people as lost sheep without a shepherd, right before Jesus compared their work to the harvest.
His words are particularly striking, as they reference a harvest that is going to be huge, but without enough workers to get the work done. Jesus talks about asking God to send more people to do the work of harvesting the seeds he planted in his preaching. It didn’t occur to me until recently that Jesus’ words are pretty intense. He is making a dramatic statement about the desperate, urgent need for people to do God’s work in the lives of those who need him. It’s easy to see the text as a simple statement of need until you see farmers in harvest. It reframes the statement entirely. This is particularly true when you realize that it’s not about grain or grapes going bad in the field because you missed the window for reaping. It’s about the eternal destiny of people God created and Jesus died for.
Jesus was announcing a truth that goes well beyond his day. Every generation that has come and gone since his ministry is a field in need of sowing the truth and harvesting the growth that comes after. Churches have the same work before them that they have always had. Churches are perpetually short of workers for the harvest. Everyone who believes in and follows Jesus is called to step into the fields and do the work. We must all ask ourselves if we are taking up our tools and showing up for harvest. Are we treating it with the appropriate effort and focus? Are we dealing with God’s harvest of eternal souls at the same level as the harvest of wheat year after year?
