Harvest
Sandwiches on the sunny beach in Cornwall as a child, crusty bread, cheese and wine on honeymoon in Italy…. I have some wonderful memories associated with bread.
Unfortunately, since I have been diagnosed Coeliac, bread is off the menu. Well, I can eat gluten free bread… but it just isn't the same.
Jesus uses bread as an everyday example to draw people into his stories and teaching and so we will be looking at a few of these this week.
Before you have bread, you need flour, and flour (unless it is gluten free) is generally made from wheat. As a child, I used to look forward to harvest festival, because the church would smell delicious. The congregation would gather on the Saturday to arrange all the bounty that had been brought into church and display it. Then there would be a harvest supper with dancing, with a beautiful harvest loaf in the shape of a sheaf of wheat with a little mouse on it. This is a tradition we took hold of as a family and so we started to make the harvest loaf for our local village church when our children were small.
Jesus talks about the harvest. There is the parable of the Sower (Mark 14:1-20) which he uses to explain how difficult it is for God's word to take root and grow in someone's life; he tells the story of the weeds (Matthew 13:24-29) showing that followers of Christ must live in an evil world: and he tells the story of how a grain of wheat must enter the ground and die before it can bear fruit foretelling his own death. (John 12:23-25).:
Jesus also told his disciples:
The harvest is plentiful and the workers are few
Luke 10:2 [NIV]
...urging them to go out and do the work of God in the world.
As you go about the countryside and see the crops ripening, thank God for the growth and reflect upon the significance of these parables for your life.
Mairi Mowbray
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