Have you ever had a garden? Do you know what it’s like to watch little shoots come up, grow, get buds and flowers, and then develop pods, beans, ears of corn, or tomatoes? Have you watched for the right moment to harvest a crop, your own crop? Do you know the sort of nervousness a gardener can have over the possibility that the wrong sort of person will tramp through the neat rows, crushing little plants with rough boots, tearing off peas that don’t yet fill out the pods, knocking off delicate blossoms that would otherwise mature into tender butter beans? Do you understand the trust extended when one says to another person, “Here, take this basket and you can pick the tomatoes—be sure they’re ripe and ready. And pick two heads of Bibb lettuce, please, but don’t be harsh with it or you’ll crush the leaves. Then pick a cucumber, the one nearest the path, but don’t knock against the three others near it that need a little longer to ripen.” A harvest can be spoiled by people who won’t listen to instructions, or who won’t admit their lack of know-how and ask.
We’re given two striking pictures in the brief space of Matthew 9:36, 37. One is of God as the Lord of the harvest, trusting human beings to be his laborers in this business of harvesting. Another is the picture of Christ, who gave his life for the sheep, being moved with compassion as he looked at the multitudes of human beings filling the synagogues, the fields, and the streets of the cities and villages. He was moved with compassion, we are told, because they were distressed, scattered as sheep without a shepherd. They were distressed and scattered because they were very mixed up concerning the truth: they needed to be cared for by spiritual shepherds. In Mark 6:34 Jesus began to teach many things to these people who were as sheep not having a shepherd, and toward whom he was moved with compassion. But he was not going to stay on the earth to keep teaching the frightened, “baaing” people.
John 4:35–38 speaks again of a harvest that is ready to be gathered in:
I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that hereon ye bestowed no labor: other men labored, and ye are entered into their labors.
In Matthew 9:36 and 37 these two amazing pictures are brought together in two verses. How often have I heard these verses since early childhood in China? How often have you heard them? Yet suddenly at times it is as if lightning has streaked across a dark sky, or the sun has suddenly come out, splitting the fog to make a snow-covered scene dazzlingly clear, and we see something new. Fran was reading Matthew 9 to us this morning while we were still in bed, and it was one of those dazzling times of suddenly “seeing” as if I had been blind before. He is the Lord of the harvest!
It is his harvest!” I exclaimed. “We’re being trusted to gather in his harvest. What a precious commission we have been given! What trust has been placed in us!” It is as if we had the basket and were on our way down to the most precious of vegetable gardens, trusted by the owner to carry out his directions. We, you and I, are to be harvesters, trusted to not crash in like oafs and spoil things with our ignorance.
How can he trust us? He is compassionate. He has wept over people. They matter to him. Yet he trusts us to gather in the harvest. How dare we undertake such a delicately important task—and yet, how dare we not? He has appointed no angels to take over. Human beings are the ones to do it. But how?
He can trust us to do what he gives us to do because he knows his promises are true. He knows that he will be faithful to the end, and that we need only to come to him for the help we need, over and over again. He knows that his patience will not give out. He has promised to guide us and lead us to do that which will fit into the whole plan of bringing in the harvest. And as we fit in, we don’t even need to count on our own strength and wisdom to do whatever he tells us to do.
But how do we find out what our part is?
If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed [James 1:5, 6].
Yes, we have to ask what he wants us to do, along with asking for the wisdom to do it, but with the kind of faith that is willing to do what he unfolds, sight unseen. Faith in him and in his plan for his harvest: that is what this is all about. It is the willingness to let him be the Lord of the harvest, and not to tell him we have a better method we learned in another farmer’s land.
Suppose that his job for me is sharpening sythes. “But I wanted to go out and drive a tractor!” He knows, and we need to acknowledge that he knows. Or suppose that his job for me is operating the newest kind of harvesting machine. Then I am not to say, “But I love the old way of doing things, and this is an antique scythe I have had handed down to me for generations. I want to do it in the good old way.” This is his farm, his harvest, and he is the one who is giving the equipment, the directions, and the strength to carry them out. I am to trust him because of who he is, and because of the truth of what he says, and what he has promised:
I am the LORD thy God, that divided the sea, whose waves roared; THE LORD of hosts is his name. And I have put my words in thy mouth, and I have covered thee in the shadow of mine hand, that I may plant the heavens, and lay the foundations of the earth, and say unto Zion, Thou art my people [Isa. 51:15, 16].
Whether he wants you to be setting type for printing presses, selling groceries across the counter, driving a laundry truck, painting a house, making furniture, working in a little underground office of a city building, digging potatoes on a farm, doing secretarial work, nursing sick people in a hospital or at home, whatever unlikely looking harvesting work it seems to be, he really does have a place for each of his harvesters. The problem is that “the laborers are few.” Somehow or other some of us are not doing what he wants us to do. Some of us are not picking the crop by hand because we think we need a big machine, or we are not running the machine because we want to handpick the crop.
It seems to me correct to think of Jesus, moved with compassion in Matthew 9:36, speaking with the same deep compassion in his voice in verses 37 and 38: “Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers into his harvest.” The laborers are few, the harvest plenteous. It is his harvest! Doesn’t anybody care? Do we really care? What about the old chorus, “Lord, send me; here I am, send me; across the street, or across the sea”? Do we put limits on what we really mean? Are we too proud? Or too proud of our humbleness? Why are the laborers few?
If we have had a flash of understanding, may the clouds not gather back over the sun, and dullness settle down on what we have seen. Pray ye therefore that the Lord of the harvest will send forth more trusted harvesters.
