God shares the harvest with us – Rom 8:18-25, Ps 126

Wednesday of Ordinary Time, Week 30; Holy Cross Parish.

As the cold sets in, and we look back the rather mild summer we enjoyed, it can be hard to even remember last year’s summer when we baked and roasted and our fields were parched.  And while our lawns have recovered, Michiana farmers are still feeling the hit of the summer of 2012.  Sowing seed is an anxious time when your livelihood depends on it, because you just don’t know what will become of it.  Your own efforts to tend its growth will amount to nothing in the weather doesn’t cooperate.  In the religious myths of Ugarit and Egypt, sowing season was linked with a festival mourning the death of a god who was buried with the seed and would be reborn with rejoicing with the harvest.  While Israel would not (at least officially) have bought into the mythology, our psalmist can still refer to a shared recognition that sowing is a time of tears, of anxious uncertainty, and rejoicing will have to wait until the harvest.

We don’t have to dwell in anxious uncertainty.  No, the Kingdom is not yet fully realized, sin, while conquered, still lurks at our thresholds, and death, though vanquished, still takes our loved ones from us, for a time.  But, God has triumphed in Christ.  Yes, we still feel the weight of sorrow pull down on us because the world is still not as it should be.  But we don’t live in a world trembling with anxious uncertainty, like the Negev unsure if its life will wither without water, or be saved by torrents (to use the Psalmist’s language).  No, to turn to Paul’s language, we live in a world awaiting with eager expectation; dough about to rise, as Jesus’ parable put it.

Because the harvest has happened.  Christ, the seed, did die, was buried and rose that we might die no more.  The harvest has happened, and God has shared with us the first fruits.  In Israelite sacrifices, the very first things you harvested went to God, to show the priority He had in your life; then the rest was for your sustenance.  In God’s harvest, He gives the first fruits to us and He will share the whole harvest with us, his heirs, his adopted children.  It can be so hard to wait in this valley of tears.  But we don’t wait like an anxious sower.  We wait in confidence, in hope, consoled by the Spirit, adopted by the Father, who longs for us to share fully in his bountiful harvest.