Luke 10:1-24 page 1
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Luke 10:1-24 page 1 |
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"What on earth is a ploughing match?" I asked Debbie. She was incredulous that I did not know, and proceeded to describe in some detail a contest in which teams compete to make the fastest and straightest furrows in farmland. All this was a revelation to a townie like me. Debbie prides herself on being a country girl. For her, the initials YFC mean 'Young Farmers Club'; for me they stand for 'Youth For Christ'. Farms, farming and the world of agriculture are a mystery to me, apart from taking the children each year on a farm cottage holiday in Devon. I did have one farmer as a church member in a village congregation once, but that has been the limit of my exposure to that part of life. In a day when the supermarkets regulate the shapes of the fruit and veg they will sell, many more of us are more and more detached from the source of the produce we buy. Farmers' markets are also in reality one step removed: the farmers come to us, rather than vice-versa. All this makes Harvest Festival a curious time of the year for many. For a long time Christians have tried to make them more relevant. In the 1960s churches tried to incorporate the so-called 'industrial harvest' in the celebrations, although the output from a permanently running production line is very different from a crop that bears fruit just once a year. So when Jesus uses the metaphor of the harvest, it may not be the language of everyday life that it was for his first hearers. Yet he used it as an image to convey some important teaching. And our passage from Luke 10 is one of a few places where he deploys the harvest language to fire his disciples' imaginations in the task of summoning those who are responsive to the call of God's kingdom. 'The harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few,' he says [Luke 10:2]. Now if we even try to translate that, it's one of Jesus' most astonishing statements for us today. The harvest is plentiful? You're kidding, Jesus. You're implying that lots of people want to come into your kingdom. Well maybe you had them queuing up, but we don't. Not many people want the Christian message today. The labourers are few? Yes, we'll go with that: there are fewer and fewer of us. But we don't see a plentiful harvest. There are many ways in which we could respond to Jesus' challenge here. One is to say that Jesus had them clamouring for his message and we don't. Another would be to say that people are always interested in Jesus but it's the Church that turns them off. Or we might observe that today people do have an interest in spiritual things generally, but they don't see the Christian Church as holding the answers to the questions they pose. Whichever it is, the challenge of Jesus should challenge us. Why would people find him attractive but not us? Why would they look for the spiritual but not consider our faith? Might there be some clues in this passage? Jesus has a revolutionary approach for his disciples to gather in the spiritual harvest. What he teaches his followers here as they go out as his advance heralds is quite different from what most of us have been taught about sharing the Good News of the Kingdom. I want to look at Jesus' teaching on the spiritual harvest in four stages.
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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration. |
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