The Lord of The Harvest

by Anthony Esolen

When Jesus walked the earth in Galilee, he knew the natural world as most men until our time have known it. He felt the sun and the wind and the rain upon his flesh. He traveled on foot over rugged hills; he retreated, or rather strode boldly, up to the mountaintops to pray, to find those artesian wells of silence, where hovered the Spirit of God.

Jesus, we are told, chose metaphors from nature because they were ready to hand, easy for his disciples to grasp. I think that's true, if we mean, for instance, that everyone had either sown seed in a field or seen someone doing it, and so could come to some initial awareness of what Jesus was talking about. But that's only a part of the truth, and probably the smallest part.

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Anthony Esolen is a professor at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire, and the author of many books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House). He and his wife Debra publish a web magazine, Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com), on poetry, hymnody, language, classic films, and music. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

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