The Lord of the Harvest

The Lord of the Harvest

     When Jesus walked the earth in Galilee, He knew the natural world as most men until our time have known it.  He felt the sun and the wind and the rain upon his flesh.  He traveled on foot over rugged hills; he retreated, or rather strode boldly, up to the mountaintops to pray, to find those artesian wells of silence, where hovered the Spirit of God.
     Jesus, we are told, chose metaphors from nature because they were ready to hand, easy for his disciples to grasp.  I think that’s true, if we mean, for instance, that everyone had either sown seed in a field or seen someone doing it, and so they could come to some initial awareness of what Jesus was talking about.  But it’s only a part of the truth, and probably the smallest part.
     One time, after an especially strenuous stretch of preaching, healing, and meeting the disappointment of disbelief and half-belief, Jesus looked out upon the land, and when he saw the multitudes, He “was moved with compassion …