Bible reading: Matthew 9:35-38.

Message.

“For a few days or a week or a fortnight, the fields stood ‘ripe unto harvest’. It was the one perfect period in the hamlet year. The human eye loves to rest upon wide expanses of pure colour: the moors in the purple heyday of the heather, miles of green downland, and the sea when it lies calm and blue and boundless, all delight it; but to some none of these, lovely though they all are, gives the same satisfaction of spirit as acres upon acres of golden corn. There is both beauty and bread and the seeds of bread for future generations.

“In the fields where the harvest had begun all was bustle and activity. At that time the mechanical reaper with long, red, revolving arms like windmill sails had already appeared in the locality; but it was looked upon by the men as an auxiliary, a farmers’ toy; the scythe still did most of the work and they did not dream it would ever be superseded. So while the red sails revolved in one field and the youth on the driver’s seat of the machine called cheerily to his horses and women followed behind to bind the corn into sheaves, in the next field a band of men would be whetting their scythes and mowing by hand as their fathers had done before them”.

That was Laura Thompson’s description of harvest in “Lark Rise to Candleford”, less than 150 years ago. How labour-intensive it was for, as Flora goes on to say, “After the mowing and reaping and binding came the carrying, the busiest time of all. Every man and boy put his best foot forward then, for, when the corn was cut and dried it was imperative to get it stacked and thatched before the weather broke. All day and far into the twilight the yellow-and-blue painted farm wagons passed and repassed along the roads between the field and the stack-yard. Big cart-horses returning with an empty wagon were made to gallop like two-year-olds. In the fields men pitchforked the sheaves to the one who was building the load on the wagon, and the air resounded with ‘Hold tights’ and ‘Wert ups; and ‘Who-o-oas’ until at last, in the cool dusk of an August evening, the last load was brought in”. Compare that to today, where just a couple of people driving a combine and a tractor can harvest a much larger area in a far shorter time.

Flora Thompson wrote of her delight in seeing the fields ready for harvest. But when Jesus used this image in speaking to his disciples, it was with sadness rather than joy. For his words came after a tour around many towns and villages, where he was brought face-to-face with disease and sickness, poverty and inequality which held so many people prisoner. We are told that he was filled – I’d say overwhelmed – with sadness at their situation. Like King Edward VIII who, on visiting Dowlais in November 1936 and seeing its dereliction and destitution, Jesus cried out, “Something must be done”. Unlike the King, Jesus turned to his disciples and said: “Look at those people as I do. They are like a field that’s ripe for harvest. Pray for workers to go and bring it in”.

We all know this passage very well but we may be less aware of its historical context, which is quite interesting. It seems that most farming in ancient Palestine took place on family smallholdings – I suppose they were rather like crofts in Scotland. These typically relied on members of the extended family or clan, neighbours, friends, fellow villagers and, on very rare occasions, locally-hired workers, to bring in the harvest. Even the hired workers, it seems, were usually paid with produce rather than cash; harvesting was very much a shared activity.

However, alongside these small family farms were larger estates, run by wealthy landowners. It’s these that Jesus seems to have in mind when he speaks to his disciples. There are two hints which support this idea: one is that paid contract workers, rather than family members or friends, have to be brought in to gather the harvest, the other is the reference he makes to the “lord” or “master” of the harvest who could be the landowner himself or else his farm manager. Either way, we’re not now thinking of a group of neighbours helping each other out as equals, but of an employment scenario in which paid workers must do what their boss tells them to do. It’s a very different picture.

We’re not told what kind of harvest Jesus was pointing out to his disciples. A grain harvest is what immediately springs to mind, but there were two other important harvests in the Palestinian year: one of grapes (both for eating and wine-making) and the other of olives. Nevertheless I’ll stick to the traditional picture of grain harvesting, not least because Jesus spoke of a field rather than a vineyard or an olive grove. I think, too, that he wanted his disciples to think of the specific task of reaping or cutting the crop even though grain has to go through a number of other processes before it ends up in sacks or storage.

And reaping was hard physical labour in the days before machinery. For hours on end, reapers had to swing hard with a hand-held sickle or scythe to cut the stalks, which meant being constantly bent over with an arched back. The task was not made any easier by the horrid conditions under which reaping took place: the labourers had to contend with the burning heat of the sun and plagues of gnats, flies, mosquitoes, and wasps. Although workers wore wide-brimmed hats these gave little protection. Coupled to this was the fact that, although some hired workers were treated well, being well paid and given board, lodging and clothing, others were treated as the lowest of the low, sometimes even more badly than slaves. At the end of their contract they might not even be paid what they had been promised. But they were desperate people who couldn’t turn down any offer of a job.

Having said that, the landowners were also vulnerable as they needed their harvests to be successful. Just like today’s farmers, they knew that they only had a limited time window to get the job done; if that didn’t happen the crop would end up being spoiled and having to be written off as a loss. I have no idea how fierce or competitive the labour market was, but landowners knew that they had to hire sufficient workers. If for any reason they couldn’t, the task simply could not be done. What’s intriguing about Jesus’s wording is that he talks about “beseeching” the lord of the harvest to “push” or “shove out” workers in order to get the job done; this sounds like a group of subordinates pleading with an indifferent farm manager or landowner to get a move on, to realise that the harvest will spoil if he doesn’t hire the labourers and set them to work as soon as he possibly can. One must ask what picture this gives us of God and has care for suffering people – we’ll come back that a little later.

Jesus tells his disciples to pray for workers to be thrust (the original Greek word is a strong one) into the harvest field. But what is that harvest? Obviously he wasn’t thinking of physical fields with grain growing in them – so what does he mean? For many years I took this to be a command to go and evangelise, to see spiritually needy people coming to faith in God and finding salvation. Indeed I’ve heard many preachers saying just that, exhorting their listeners to “get out there” and “reap a harvest of souls”. I may have said that myself. But I now think that I was mistaken, partially at least. There are two reasons for that. One is simply that there doesn’t seem to be a ready “harvest” of “souls” ready to be “harvested” and brought into the Church; most folk aren’t interested in our message and certainly don’t want us to pester them. They’ve got their lives to live, and will do that by themselves.

The other reason why I think I’ve been mistaken comes in the Gospel itself. For what has Jesus been doing? He has been preaching or, as Matthew puts it, “proclaiming the Kingdom” although we don’t know with how much response. But he’s also been healing all kinds of sicknesses, which people would have found astounding in those days before modern medicine and the NHS. In other words, Jesus is after more than “conversions”. He wants to see these people restored in body, soul and spirit, flourishing and enjoying life as complete human beings

That is a task which Jesus cannot achieve by himself. While on earth he is limited by the constraints of time and space: if he’s in Nazareth, he cannot be at Capernaum, if he’s by the shore of Lake Galilee, he cannot be in Jerusalem. And he can only stop briefly in the places he does visit: if someone who’s gravely ill turns up on the day after Jesus has left, Jesus cannot help him. That’s how things are; which is why Jesus turns to the disciples and says, “Pray for God to send people to help in this immense and pressing task” – with the clear implication, “Perhaps you yourselves should be the answer to that prayer”.

So, when Jesus asks his disciples to look at the field “ripe for harvest” and at the people who are like “sheep without a shepherd” (a mixed metaphor if there ever was one!), he isn’t merely asking them to “take a look” or even to pray. As we see if we read straight on into the next chapter, he is in fact preparing them to get out among the poor people just as he did. They are to act as his envoys, his representatives, his agents; each of them is, if you like, to be a “little Jesus” as they not only continue but enlarge his work. The group of disciples can cover twelve times the amount of ground that Jesus could; the 72 that he sends out in Luke’s Gospel multiply that number sixfold; and, when we think of the early Church, the workers become impossible to count.

That, of course, assumes that Christians do get “stuck into” ministry rather than passively lapping up the benefits of their faith. Ministry may include activities as diverse as food banks, parent-toddler groups, lunch clubs or coffee mornings, night shelters, community cafes, warm spaces, and children’s breakfast or holiday clubs and after-school care. That’s as well as drug and alcohol support groups, mental health and counselling services, youth clubs, and credit unions. It’s been estimated that the economic value of all this effort adds up to something like £12bn per year – and that’s before one counts the help and wholeness these projects give to individuals, which is surely far more important. But these projects need volunteers to run and support them; I believe that many have found that, since Covid, the needs have become more challenging and the help harder to come by. If that’s the case – and we all know that many people still feel helpless and hopeless – then Jesus’s words, “Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into the harvest” are, sadly, as relevant today as they were when he said them, all those years ago.