God’s own field
Harvest, in the agricultural sense, is well past. All is safely (or soggily) gathered in and the appealing blocks of barley and hay baling our landscape into a pop-up sculpture park have all but disappeared. The Church’s Harvest celebrations – extended as a ‘Creationtide’ season into October – are in one sense, then, a delayed thanksgiving for the yield of former months. That needn’t trouble us, however, for they are just as much focused on a rather less specific future point: the anticipated end of the world believers know as the Last Judgement. For many, this is merely one of the vestiges of a Christian worldview with little bearing on present times, a sickle blade blunted by unbelief.
Nevertheless, the idea of a harvest that separates the righteous from the unrighteous often crops up in Jesus’ teaching and has gained a new edge as we witness the ecological ends of our actions, more fearfully evident with each passing, and slightly warmer, year. The once-familiar Parable of the Wheat and the Tares tells us that good and evil inevitably grow together in this life: one is easy to mistake for the other and this fact should caution us away from prejudice or self-righteousness. But it is also a warning that the real myth is the one that imagines our actions have no lasting or eternal consequences. They do, they will - and to ignore this is simply to hasten the day.
Bishop Andrew