Revival and Renewal

Bronze, shorn, past-ripe, dust
Covers faces, boots, barns
The roadside sumac, lilac late blooming,
Lungs and hearts as a sign of blessing.
The scrabbled landscape sighs
In relief. The corn had weighed
It down, as each road tilted toward the
Pull of corn-stalk and hay bale. It had grown
To swallow car, road, farm, mind, 
As September waned and withered. 
And now I see the miracle: bounty! 
Reaping and sowing; how hard the wise
Farmer must strive to enter into his rest. 

I think of the crop I tend. Sinuous,
Sown in Driftless soil. Rooted in a
Land older than me, with valleys whose dew I shall never taste
With woes I shall never feel. 
Nevertheless, every Sunday
I prepare for that final September, when
Busy sowing in pew, home, heart, mind, 
The reapers shall overtake us 
And every field shall be scraped, sanctified:
Pews emptied, roots cut, and all of us,
Faces, boots, barns, the late purple lilac on the roadside
The sumac, the lung, the heart—shall be covered by the
Sign of harvest
Rest.  

One of the most interesting things about living in farm country is watching the landscape change. Nature itself changes—God speaks newness in every season. But the change in the farmland is more apocalyptic. It is a shearing, like a newly shorn sheep. Reaping is destiny for the field, and every field encounters the reapers at different times. Yet, eventually, the whole landscape (save hollow or pasture, forest or yard) is transformed. 

Is it a surprise, then, that the dominant image Jesus used for the coming judgment is of a harvest? Matthew records several of Jesus’ harvest parables, the most famous being the Parable of the Soils (Matthew 13:1-17), but the one that most intrigues me being found just a few verses later (13:24-31): 

He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” ’ ” 

As I wrote “Harvest,” I was struck by this image of the kingdom as a field, and the word of the Master: “at harvest time I will tell the reapers, ‘Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’” This is the moment of relief, an eternal harvest celebration, a final shearing of the whole earth. For the time being, we are sowing, preparing, working hard, waiting for harvest. Like each piece of farmland in late September, this final reaping is our destiny, when what the Enemy has sowed shall be burned to tinder, and we will be brought into an eternal Rest.