Column: Illuminations
The Lord of The Harvest
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.
One time, after an especially strenuous stretch of preaching, healing, and meeting with the disappointment of disbelief and half-belief, Jesus looked out upon the land, and when he saw the multitudes, he "was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd." Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers into his harvest" (Matt. 9:36–38).
You gather sheep, you scatter seed; but the Lord has so willed it that his flock will not be gathered without shepherds and his seed will not be scattered without sowers. The people to whom he spoke were familiar with flocks and harvests, but they were familiar with them as the mysterious things they really are. How can there be so much life in the tiny seed? How has the Lord impressed his will upon things invisible to mortal sight, like the seed, or a movement of the human heart? Why should he work through "things that are naught," like seeds, or shepherds, or the laborers of the harvest?
It's not that he needs our labor. "Every good and perfect gift is from above," says James, "and cometh down from the Father of lights" (James 1:17). We are not only people who have received gifts from God. Our very existence is a gift; and we are meant to be gifts to others in turn. We are, in his providence, the sowers, the seed, the field, the fruit, and the gleaners; and we are none of these things at all except by his secret and gracious action.
All from God
We should keep this mystery in mind when we sing the harvest hymns. These are songs of praise for the fruitfulness of nature, but more than that, songs of praise for the fruitfulness of grace. We see, in the lovely hymn We Plough the Fields, this mysterious penetration of things of naught by him Who is:
We plough the fields, and scatter
The good seed on the land,But it is fed and watered
By God's almighty hand;He sends the snow in winter,
The warmth to swell the grain,Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 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) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
32.1—January/February 2019
Sex, Women's Ordination & the Rejection of Hierarchy & Equality by James A. Altena
32.6—November/December 2019
The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs by Jesse Russell
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