Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
James 3. 1-12; Mark 8. 27-38
“Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs?”
The harvest comes at the end of a long process. Some of the seed for next year’s wheat will probably be planted in the next few weeks, to benefit from the last weeks of autumn warmth and sunshine, so it can develop a stable root system before the winter, and be less vulnerable to drought in spring.
Taking in the harvest near Stanton St Bernard in the Vale of Pewsey. © Gerry Lynch, 3 September 2023.
Yet at the same time, this year’s harvest still isn’t complete. There are still, for example, a few fields of maize around that might not be harvested until well into October. The late apples and pears still won’t be ready to pick for weeks yet. And many of our root vegetables and leafy greens reach their prime in the middle of winter – the parsnips don’t taste their best until they’ve been through their first hard frost.
Managing all this takes enormous skill from our farmers and a lot of education in science and, if they want to make a living from it, business. It also takes machinery, and electricity, and fuel. And also, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, pesticides. Of course, the weather plays a major role, especially in a year like this when the spring and first half of the summer were so consistently cold and wet. In fact, during the first summer I spent in Devizes, between the lockdowns in 2020, terrible storms came in August and ruined much of the arable harvest, and I spent the autumn walking past fields left in a terrible state. Viruses can also ruin a crop; they hit plants in waves just like they hit humans.
Most of all, much patience is needed to take the crops from sowing to harvest, and while agricultural knowledge and technology makes us much less vulnerable to crop failure than our ancestors, even now there is no guarantee of success. Yet despite the risks from storms and disease, a crop can’t be harvested early—the crops aren’t fit for consumption until they are ripe.
Our Gospel reading today is a very important one. It forms the hinge of Mark’s Gospel, which we have been working our way through on Sundays since last December. While the first part of Jesus’ ministry took place entirely around the Sea of Galilee in Mark’s understanding, in recent encounters it has begun to range more widely. This story takes place when Christ and His disciples are heading for the villages around Caesarea Philippi, the capital of the petty kingdom ruled by one of Herod’s sons named Philip the Tetrarch. This was a good distance from Nazareth, nearly 60 miles or over 90 kilometres. This area is in what is now the Golan Heights, and even more specifically in a place that would become very dangerous indeed should a hot war break out between Israel and Lebanese Hizbollah.
Jesus has been followed by enormous crowds wherever He has gone, and it is on this long journey into mountain country that Jesus asks the disciples who people say He is; then He asks them who they think He is. All four Gospels agree that Peter is the first to work out that Jesus is the Messiah, the long-awaited God-sent liberator of the Jewish people. Interestingly, once Peter reveals this truth Jesus immediately orders the disciples “sternly” not to tell this to anyone.
In becoming human in the person of Jesus Christ, God sowed a seed that would be harvested at the Resurrection, after Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross healed the rift between humanity and God, which we opened through our sin, and in doing so, He opened the way to eternal life for us.
Yet it seems that, in today’s Gospel, Jesus’ ministry needs to ripen a little further before the mass of people can learn of its true end. Indeed, the disciples are also unready for the reality that loss and death, pain and brutality, are part of Christ’s mission. Peter frankly loses the plot, only to be rebuked by Jesus.
There are two important keys to understanding Mark’s Gospel, and Mark’s unique perspective on Jesus. One is the way Mark depicts the disciples as being particularly slow to grasp Jesus’ teachings; realisation dawns on them only gradually. The other is what is often called the “Messianic secret”: Jesus repeatedly asks his followers to keep quiet about His true mission.
Slowly, the disciples are learning exactly who Jesus is. Through the miracles in Galilee they have witnessed before the conversation we heard this morning, they have been gradually working out that He is far more than just a holy teacher. And the next major story in Mark, set only six days later, sees Jesus taking Peter, James and John with Him up a high mountain where they see Him transfigured in the presence of the two great Old Testament prophets, Moses and Elijah. Shortly after that, Jesus will head south for the first time, along the Jordan and eventually to Jerusalem, where His earthly mission will reach its final consummation at the empty tomb.
Earlier, I described this moment when Peter works out that Jesus is the Messiah as the hinge of Mark’s Gospel. But perhaps, at a Harvest Festival, a better analogy might be that this is the moment in Mark’s story when the ears of corn, while still far from ripe, become visible. It is like one of those wonderful midsummer days, when we can see that something miraculous is happening in the fields all around us but the wheat is still green and the harvest is still a long way off.
So to our Epistle. The Letter of James was obviously written for Jewish Christians, it has traditionally been attributed to James the Brother of Jesus, the leader of the Church in Jerusalem in the decade or so after the Resurrection. My view is that the traditional view of its authorship is correct, and in it we are touching the world of the very earliest Christians. It has a very direct style, to put it mildly: James has no concerns about telling his readers to pull their socks up, live better lives, and prepare to meet the Lord on His return.
Given James’ choice of topic, one thing familiar to us that seems to have been a problem among these early Christians in Jerusalem, was gossip – and evil-tongued gossip at that! I don’t know about you, but it reassures me that these first Christians, many of whom must have known Jesus when He walked the Earth, were people just like us, with the same problems as us. Remarkable people, but also flawed.
That’s the paradox of human existence, and the paradox of our lives as Christians, where what we actually do often falls so far short of the ideals we aspire to living out. James reminds us that from the same mouth comes blessing and cursing. God allows both the good and the bad to grow in us. It is only when we finally meet Him face-to-face that we will truly learn what in us has borne fruit, and will be gathered into His harvest, and what will need to be discarded for us to become, in the life to come, the people who we truly are.
Remember how the sermon started, how complex it is for farmers to manage a harvest of so many different crops. How much more complex is a harvest of human souls. God is managing all this complexity in the whole human race, and our primary job is to put our trust in Him and have faith that on the Cross He paid the price for all that could possibly keep us from spending eternity is His nearer presence.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Top image: Strawbales Near Lockeridge, Wiltshire. © Gerry Lynch, 25 August 2023.
Amen brother. I’m the chief of sinners.