Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe! Praise God. His kingdom is coming, his heavenly city is knocking, the New Jerusalem is waiting for him to call us home, and woe to those who aren’t ready! I know I am. I am ready for that kingdom that Jesus tells us is like a man who goes out to scatter seed. And God brings up that seed with no help from man. God, in his grace and power is bringing up his Elect and we don’t know how, but we’re thankful for what he has done in our lives. We’re thankful that he saved us. We’re thankful that we’ll get to sing and shout the victory over those wicked nations that have gathered before us. In Mark 4:29 Jesus is quoting the prophet Joel who tells us what that great day will be like:
“Put in the Sickle, for the harvest is ripe.
Go in, tread, for the wine press is full.
The vats overflow, for their wickedness is great.
Multitudes, multitudes, in the valley of decision!
The sun and the moon are darkened…
…and the stars withdraw their shining…”
I am too comfortable with hearing this message…
We, the Church, are too comfortable with speaking this message…
But we are not alone in this. This message of judgment was a message of hope to those first century Jews who saw the nations under the banner of Rome cover Jerusalem with their pagan symbols and foreign languages. We can hear Joel’s war scroll, as this passage is often called, whispered behind the backs of passing Centurions by those righteous few who were working underground for the liberation of their homeland. To the Zealots, this is a rallying cry; to the Peasants it was a breath of hope. Hope that one day their lands would no longer be called upon to pay tribute to a King or Emperor but to the presence of the living God.
This is the conversation that we enter into when we read Mark 4:29, and even though Mark’s Greek is not as refined as the translators of the Septuagint he is quoting Joel quite directly, Mark’s just saying it with a bit of back-water twang. The ending to this parable was meant to pull up this judgment scene in its hearers with all the vividness and emotion that it arouses. We are supposed to come to this parable with preconceptions. Mark is banking on it. And though it may be a stretch to say that we have the same scriptural memory as Mark’s initial audience we don’t have to work too hard to bring about the emotional weight that the Gospel is trying to pull from us. All we have to do is add a hammer.
Doubtless there are many of us here who can remember the significance of a golden hammer and sickle in the upper left hand corner of a red flag. These two common tools of industry and agriculture came together to form a symbol that contributed to a conflict which kept our world on edge for half of a century.
I can remember taking Marx’s Das Kapital, part of my enlightened 21st century education, home with me and seeing the look of wide eyed astonishment on my grandparents faces as they contemplated the prospect that their grandson might be a communist: A thought, which only 50 years ago would have been spoken in a hushed tone in a coffee shop or shouted across the aisle in the halls of the Senate. My parents, both born during the Cuban Missile Crisis, came to adulthood never expecting to see the year 1980. They lived through high school waiting for that hammer and sickle to rush across the fields of West German barley into a new valley of decision; where fire would rain from the sky in ways that make the harshest prophecy from Revelation seem tame. Even God thought the Hydrogen bomb was a bit harsh.
But we don’t even need to look back that far. Even today we hear parts of the Church touting the deaths of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan as the first fruits of God’s harvest of the wicked. We hear daily of the importance of supporting Israel in its quest to carve out a place amongst the nations. We come to this passage with a burden. We come to this parable ready for judgment, but Jesus, as he often does, comes to us with abundant grace.
A person goes out to scatter seed, and after it is in the ground they go to sleep. They don’t touch it. But it grows. And they don’t know how.
There is a great temptation here, in our scientific society, to read this as an example of the simplicity of those in first century Palestine. They didn’t know about the process of germination, about the nutrients in the soil necessary for a good crop, or about the complex process of photosynthesis that would eventually produce the grain. We can say all this with certainty, what we cannot say, however is that first century Palestinians did not know how plants grow. Though they may have been short on the why of the process, it is a great hubris to say that we are better acquainted with agriculture than the contemporaries of Mark, who lived a life so attached to the land that we can scarcely imagine the intimate relationship between the people their land, and their crops.
Those who worked the land at that time would have known better than any of us just how to till the earth before planting. Exactly how to keep harmful weeds out of their field when the stalks came up, what insects to keep away when the grain started to show, and just how tend to the full head that would later appear on the grain. These things, which are for us today specialized knowledge would be facts of life for the masses whom Jesus was addressing. They knew how plants grow. They knew what needed to be done to ensure a fruitful harvest, which is why when the person in our parable does nothing to tend their crop we meet with that phrase of amazement. “…and he does not know how.” Against all common knowledge these plants grow when they should die. They flourish when they should fail. This is God at work, because we haven’t done a thing.
After my high school graduation my father took me on a road trip out west to see the places that became so familiar to him in his years as a long-distance trucker. We were in a Ford Econoline that we had done some work to allow us to fit a full sized bed where the rear two seats should be. We were switching between driving and sleeping in four-hour shifts and were poised to make it from Jacksonville, Florida to Los Angeles in two days.
I had been in the passenger seat since the Lake Ponchatrain bridge when we pulled in to get gas in the small town of Brehenam, Texas. I got out to stretch my legs and kick the tires when I noticed that there was a think layer of grease covering the rear passenger side wheel well that ran up the rear of the van and coated the rear windshield. We found the Ford dealership in town, put the van in the shop, and waited for the diagnostic. We had a cracked bearing seal, which was allowing the spinning tire to fling the entirety of its lubrication along the back of the van. “Yall’s bearing should have seized up about fifty miles back,” the mechanic said. He had next to no idea how we made it there.
The lack of lubrication in the bearing meant that the steel interior of the bearing was heating up to the point at which the moving parts in the wheel casing should have fused themselves together and ceased to move at all. Which, at 70 miles an hour, is not a happy prospect. Both my father and I understand the why but in that particular instance we did not know how we made it to the dealership. We didn’t do a thing, except drive to far. This was God at work.
We all have, at one time or another had those moments where we stand with the sower and scratch our heads. We all have stood in fields of grace. We have all lived in moments of wonder; we carry those moments with us, just as we carry our narratives of judgment and fear. All that we are asked by this parable is that, while we’re waiting for the harvest, while we’re waiting for the sickle, we keep that sense of amazement. That we keep our sense of God at work, beyond anything we have ever expected, beyond all our hopes, fears, and judgments.
May we all stand in fields of grace, a grace that sustains and keeps us in the presence of the living God. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.
