THE HARVEST HAS COME
Mark 4:26-29
26 He said, “God’s Kingdom is as if a man should cast seed on the earth, 27 and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring up and grow, though he doesn’t know how. 28 For the earth bears fruit by itself: first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. 29 But when the fruit is ripe, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”
Last week Wednesday ended the Jewish Holiday of 2024, called the Shavuot, one of the originally agricultural Jewish Festivals. The other two originally agricultural festivals are the Pesach and the Sukkoth, where the Pesach marks the barley harvest, the Shavuot marks the wheat harvest, and the Sukkoth marks the fruit harvest.
Interestingly, all three very much tangibly Mother Earth ground ed agricultural festival are clothed with deep spiritual content and ritual practice.
Namely the Pesach is connected to the Passover when the Angel of Death flew over Egypt and also with whole experience of the Exodus, where God, with an extended hand, delivered the people from Egypt, the house of slavery. Otherwise the Pesach corresponds with the Christian Easter.
The Shavuot is connected spiritually to the experience of the sojurning at the Mount Sinai, receiving the Ten Commandments and the Torah itself. The Shavuot corresponds with the Christian Pentecost.
The third pilgrimage festival, the Sukkoth is connected to the experience of the forty years long wandering in the desert, this the people used to build tent resembling temporary sheds in order to remember those times.
Beside the spiritual content and the ritual practice of these three major, so called pilgrimage festivals, when to show up at the Jerusalem temple was mandatory, the agricultural centered celebration of the harvest three times a year itself carried a meaning, where the harvest had a deep spiritual content and also a biblical context, as well.
The abundant harvest was a blessing from the Lord, interestingly it was not dependent on the work hours somebody spent on the fields but on the sharing of the harvest, as it is written: "When you reap your harvest in your field, and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go again to get it. It shall be for the foreigner, for the fatherless, and for the widow, that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.
Deuteronomy 24:19
And as a general rule it is also written that “When you reap the harvest of your land, you must not wholly reap into the corners of your field. You must not gather the gleanings of your harvest. You must leave them for the poor, the fatherless and for the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.” Leviticus 23 : 22
Once upon a New Testament time, Jesus became hungry, when they were approaching Jerusalem. It was way before Easter and it was not yet the season when the fige would have been ripening. Nonetheless, at the roadside they saw a fig tree. The found on it nothing but leaves. It can be euphemised, but it is hard to state otherwisely, that Jesus, the image of the Heavenly Father, cursed the fig tree by saying, that from now on, “Let there be no fruit from you forever! Immediately the fig tree withered away." (Mt.21:19)
We should notice that by earthly calculations, as there was no fig season yet, so there was physically impossible to find fruit in the fig tree branches. We should assume that Jesus was not a man without appropriate reason, who was unable to realize or who was not willing to acknowledge that the fig tree was right in not having figs on its branches, when according to the world's order there was no fig season, yet.
Nonetheless, the fig tree withered away immediately, because seemly Jesus cursed it, aka he sentenced the fig tree to immediate death, without a second chance, that maybe at- that- time -tomorrow will be a better non-season day to have ripe figs on the tree.
That is on the surface only.
This encounter happened between a fig tree from this world, and Jesus who carried the presence of the Father in Heaven on Earth. In order to have figs in a non-season a fig tree must have faith. In Heaven there is no such thing as season or non-season, harvest or no harvest. In the eternal Heaven every day is harvest day, the trees keep yielding the fruits every eternal day.
Wherever Jesus went on Earth, Heaven went with him. In his heavenly presence on Earth the fig tree must have yielded fruit, except when it did not, if it did, it would have been considered as a miracle. When he visited his home town, it is written in the Gospel of Matthew, that Jesus had to complain against their unbelief, saying that “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country and in his own house.”
However the Gospel noted, that “He didn’t do many miracles there because of their unbelief.” Definitely faith and the withering of the fig tree had a connection in this Gospel story, as the disciples were amazed about what happened to the tree, though it could have been deemed as a negative miracle. They asked, how the fig tree withered immediately?
Jesus told them that “Most certainly I tell you, if you have faith and don’t doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you told this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ it would be done. All things, whatever you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” Mt.21:21
However, it is not that Jesus directly cursed the tree, even if it is literally in the Gospel, but in this case the spirit in the tree refused the presence of Heaven in Jesus, by rejecting the request of Jesus, that when he declares that Kingdom is here right now, then even the fig tree must yield its fruit. The tree rejected the source of life, that is why it withered immediately.
On the other side of this, it was prophetical action from Jesus, as a warning to Judea that the hour is here when Heaven came to Earth, you must yield fruit to God, the fruits of repentance and amendments.
We do not really choose to hour or the day when God, the great gatherer and harvester comes to gather and harvest the souls.
We are gathered and harvested one by one, community by community, nation by nation, all in their prescribed and ordered time.
We can not define seasons as seasons, non-seasons as non-seasons, because the harvest is always present, and we do not know when it is our turn. We are living on borrowed time. We have to realize that the hour of visitation might be very, very unexpected. May we yield the godly fruits before that time arrives, AMEN
