Harvest Festival 2007 (John 4: 34-38)

34"My food," said Jesus, "is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. 35Do you not say, 'Four months more and then the harvest'? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. 36Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. 37Thus the saying 'One sows and another reaps' is true. 38I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor."

I am going to finish rather than start with creation and I am going to focus on the words ‘one will sow and another will reap’ signify. This signifies how dependent each of us on the other but why was this so of Jesus? Was he not after all the Son of God and could he not therefore draw on an extra support if things were not going his way?

He was dependent on people firstly because he came to earth as a part of a family, a belief and a nation. He was not a free floating abstract spirit but someone who was both fully man and fully God. Announcing the coming Kingdom of God was the family business. His cousin was John the Baptist, the man who was responsible for announcing Jesus’ immanent arrival as the Son of God.

Jesus was dependent on the people because he wanted to take them with him and help them to understand the new and radical way of relating to God that he was suggesting. He had hoped that he would be able to persuade people that he was the Messiah. There were two big considerations militating against this.

One was that he was taking on an entrenched set of interests. He wanted to break the connection between the liturgy in the Temple and the worship of God. He talked of wanting to destroy the Temple and raise it up in three days (Mt 26:60-62). The ‘three days’ was Jesus time in the tomb. What he was saying was that after his resurrection there would be a new way of relating to God.

"This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the LORD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people (Jeremiah 31:33). It is no wonder that the leaders and the priests were threatened by what Jesus had to say their very livelihood was at stake.

The second issue for Jesus was that he needed to correct people’s misconceptions about what being a Messiah meant. Israel was an occupied country and people both expected and wanted him to take on the political might of the Roman Empire and liberate the Jews. He did not fit the stereotype of what people expected of a Messiah. People’s expectations shape their categories of interpretation and if Jesus had lain claim to the title to soon he would be lionised as the political Messiah Israel had been anticipating. His chance of explaining that he was a new model identifying and suffering for mankind type of messiah would then have gone.

In my own small way, I face the same issues. I am taking on people’s deeply rooted entrenched interests because I am challenging ways that people relate to the world that they have built up over their whole lives. It is a consumer culture view of the truth – we all have the right to our own opinion in the same way that we all have the right to our particular brand of consumer product: this is what I think and don’t tell me any different.

I am constantly dealing with people’s misconceptions about what it means to be a Christian. People live with a set of caricatures they formed as a child and that have not changed since. People react to their understanding of the role of the priest and never engage with the person behind. When people ask me what I think, what they often really mean is ‘can I tell you what I think?’ the reality is I can’t even start a conversation until they move out from behind their pre-formed set of ideas.

How do we then deal with the fact that all of us here in church have different understandings of what is meant by the words we hear? How do I make an appeal across the different boxes in which we live our lives – lives that are separate, fragmented and often isolated. Jesus’ appeal was not through fine arguments and grand words. His genius was to step outside word arguments and draw in the basic of creation to show that we are all part of one body.

(Invites the congregation to eat the chocolate handed out during the sermon; explains that sharing the chocolate together became a symbol of Christian unity; this is an illustration of the bread and wine in the communion and of the water in the baptism)

Multiply the chocolate eating a thousand fold, take it something that people have done for thousands of years; accept it as a command from God and you have the essence of Jesus’ appeal for Christian unity. He uses some of basic elements of food and creation – water for baptism, bread and wine for communion to teach us that one sows and another reaps. Thankfully, in the story of God’s redemption of the world it is him who sows and us who reaps.