Days of Harvest

Jewish people will have celebrated the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot) from Tuesday evening through Thursday evening this week. Shavuot celebrates harvest first fruits, the ingathering and tithing of Israel’s crops: figs, grapes, dates, pomegranates, olives, wheat, and barley. While the Temple stood, families brought their tithes to Jerusalem and presented them to God with a moving liturgy: 

“A wandering Aramean was my father. And he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation…And God brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And behold, now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground, which you, O Lord, have given me.”  

(Deuteronomy 26)

Harvest themes came to be associated with God’s provision, covenant faithfulness, and future hope of peaceful nations united in worship of the living God.  And their agricultural rhythms and struggles came to symbolize the tensions, tragedies, and celebrations of human life as members of God’s family. The Psalmist cries out:

Restore our fortunes, O Lord,

    like streams in the Negeb!

Those who sow in tears

    shall reap with shouts of joy!

He who goes out weeping,

    bearing the seed for sowing,

shall come home with shouts of joy,

    bringing his sheaves with him.

                        (Psalm 126: 4-6)

In our readings for this Sunday, we encounter some of the deep and mysterious contours of harvest symbolism. Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a harvest of grain and like the growth of a mustard seed. Echoing the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel, Jesus challenges his listeners not to mistake small beginnings with insignificance; rather, days of harvest are coming, even if we can’t imagine how.