Abundant harvests

Do Christians believe in fairness?  Fairness can seem such an obvious moral ideal, especially the fairness that gives people roughly what they deserve while making sure everyone has enough – the fairness that was described by the great political philosopher John Rawls as the true account of justice.  But so many of Jesus’s words in Matthew’s gospel seem to cut against our ideas of fairness.  As Jesus talks about the coming of the Kingdom of God, we hear of its joy, its abundance, the love that sustains it.  But so often too there is a challenge in Jesus’s words, for we hear that whatever the virtues and values of the Kingdom, it is rarely a place of fairness, certainly not of the kind of fairness we might expect or hope for here on earth.   As we’ve been reading through Matthew I’ve found my faith in fairness shaken, my own assumptions and ideals unsettled, and today it seems that the problem of fairness is right at the heart of our gospel reading.

For the parable of the sower, as Jesus tells it to the crowd, offers us a vision of God who is extravagant and abundant, who scatters the seeds of the gospel across all the land.  This is not a God who distributes fairly, but a God whose sun shines on all people, whose rain waters all the earth, whose invitation to the wedding feast extends into the highways and byways, so all might come in.  Jesus’s story about the sower tells us of a farmer willing to risk their seed, to cast it on ground that looks unpromising, on land that seems unfertile, full of stones and thorns and bristles.  Despite this reckless profligacy, some seeds will take root, plants will grow, and the harvest that is produced will be plentiful, there will be yields of a hundredfold, more fruitful than we can imagine.   God’s sowing and planting is not limited and efficient, not restricted to the soil that deserves it, and yet God’s harvest is rich and bountiful.

Jesus tells this parable to a great crowd, full of people of every kind, listening to him for all sorts of reasons.  But Matthew does not tell us what the crowd makes of it.  We do hear, though, in the verses that have been cut, that the disciples are not satisfied.  It is Jesus’s close friends and most devoted followers who are puzzled by the meaning of this story, wondering about its implications for themselves and their lives.  And so, very unusually, we have an explanation of the parable, for the disciples and not for the crowd, and this is a new version now made relevant to them, a way for those close disciples to make sense of the story so it resonates with their own lives.  For this second parable is one not so much about the sower as about the seeds and the soil, about the interplay between growth and nurture.   In this story, we are drawn to focus on the importance of good soil for the seed that is the Word, on the need to understand and to persevere, for only then will the seed be able to grow and to produce its bountiful harvest.   For the disciples, hard-working, committed, and sometimes rather anxious about their status, there is a reassurance that their efforts are important.  What they have given to Jesus and his ministry has not been in vain.

In these two parables, we catch something of the paradox of fairness in Christian life, the challenge of living on earth and welcoming the Kingdom.  We believe in the exuberant abundance of God, whose salvation and redemption of us has nothing to do with our own merit or desert but everything to do with God’s love.  And yet we also believe that our human lives matter, and that they matter before God; we believe that God invites us to work together, like seed and soil, in the growth and flourishing of the Kingdom, and that somehow there is a connection between our soil and the harvest.  Christian theologians throughout the centuries have wondered how to hold these ideas together, to make sense of them in some coherent way as they debate questions of grace and human agency.   Matthew, though, resists this; he leaves the stories side by side, holding the tension between the freely given gifts of God and the human work of cultivation.  It seems to me that each in its own way is a window onto the life of the Kingdom, each an invitation to receive and to grow, sure in the confidence that God’s harvest is plentiful and enough for us all.

For the parables invite us into the work of God’s creation, into the sowing and tending and cultivating of God’s land and God’s people. Here, the land and the people are bound into the story of God’s salvation, where the seed and the soil are no longer merely tools or instruments, but are able to flourish and to yield harvests that will provide for others and for the future.  The sowers of God’s Word offer it to all, and where there is acceptance and understanding of that Word then the seed bears fruit.   Here God’s Word and God’s love are not measured out or rationed according to what we merit or deserve, and yet they are not arbitrary, and demand from us our whole heart.  We are invited to embrace this vision of God’s goodness and generosity, before God and with each other, to see the world anew, as created and redeemed by God.  It is this invitation which we accept baptism and affirm in the eucharist, and it is a special joy to share with Eleanor and her family in Eleanor’s baptism today.  In these sacraments we are accepted not for what we are or what we can do, but simply into the infinite and eternal kindness of God, which knows no boundary or measure.  And they are a challenge, perhaps even an affront, to the cultures of status and reward which so often surround us, a reminder that not even fairness may have the last word. 

None of this, of course, is to deny the importance of justice and fairness, especially in our world where so many are still marginalised and exploited, where people are denied the resources and the dignity that they deserve.  But Jesus’s parables, Jesus’s life and death and resurrection, remind us that fairness and human justice are never the last word with God, for God’s merciful kindness is not to be measured by our standards or our sense of our own desert.   For God’s kingdom is a place where, as our collect reminds us, God’s love offers more than we can desire or deserve, a place where all God’s children can live in the love that is truly live-giving.  And the invitation to that Kingdom is scattered like seed across all God’s creation, seed which will, through God’s grace, bear the harvest of abundant love.