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Put in your sickle, and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.
Perhaps because I was a child of the wireless generation, or perhaps because I have been in the habit of reading extensively, I have always been able to see things very pictorially in my mind's eye. When I write a sermon, I can see each section of it in my mind as if I were looking at a series of paintings in an art gallery. Conversely, visual images often conjure up for me complex abstract concepts. The stonemasons of the Middle Ages were blessed with a similar, although much more refined, ability. They could turn ideas into stone so eloquently that the stone that they carved generated fruitful impressions in the minds of those who beheld their creations.
The ebb and flow, from idea to image, and back again from image to idea, is so much an ingredient of human thought patterns, partly taught, partly inherited, that the process can be at work in anyone's mind subconsciously and then suddenly burst into the conscious mind to amaze, amuse, and instruct us. Harvest always bears a great wealth of images and their associated metaphorical significance. Our readings exemplify that subtle interchange of imagery whereby the harvesters who gather the fruit of the field themselves become the harvest of God who gathers the fruit of human life when its time is ripe. Harvest hymns always have that double edge to their words, sometimes clearly defined from verse to verse, and sometimes expressed in the most haunting and exquisite of metaphors.
Harvest is a corporate, communal activity, really – the corn stalks of a whole field (not just one ear) and the harvesters working as a team (not just one harvester). Although I regularly bemoan the Protestant tendency towards individualism and its nasty habit of encouraging egocentricity in the believer (Am I saved? …I believe…), the harvesting image that often moves me most is actually a very singular one.
It is an image that you will not find in a Harvest Festival, or in the Bible, but you will find it at Lord's Cricket Ground. It is, of course, the famous weather vane depicting Old Father Time as a bowed old man with a long beard and flowing robes, who carries a scythe over his shoulder. He bends over the three stumps of the wicket prior to removing the bails from them and putting them in his pocket. It is an action that you have all seen the umpire do at the end of a day's play. The image sits so well with Grantland Rice's famous lines: For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, He writes—not that you won or lost—but how you played the Game. Paradoxically, it seems that those lines were first written to apply to American football, in a piece called "Alumnus Football" in 1941, rather than to English cricket, but the principle still remains true.
Our text leads us into the rather dangerous territory of mixed metaphor and confused visual imagery: Put in your sickle, and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe. Interestingly, although he carries a scythe over his shoulder, and his character is indirectly derived from this verse in the Book of Revelation, Old Father Time does not actually scythe down the wickets at the end of a day's play in cricket. No cricket umpire scythes down the wickets. He merely removes the bails and pockets them, then lifts the stumps out of the ground and leaves them for the grounds-man to collect. Conversely, the New Testament image really is that of the harvester: Put in your sickle, and reap… Well, it is a hand sickle rather than a scythe, but if I am to be pictured as a stalk of corn in God's harvest field, then I do get a fairly defined twinge in my ankles every time that verse is read! I think that I would rather have the angel gently remove the bails of my life and soul and then put me in God's pocket for all eternity.
The image of being safely gathered into God's barn at the harvest-time of my life is a very comforting one. I like the idea of being brought to the heavenly harvest home after my life has been as fruitful as it could have been, both for God and for his people. The Harvest Home has a distinct element of joy and celebration about it. It mixes well with the idea of the "heavenly banquet" of which the celebration of the sacrament of holy communion on earth is but a "foretaste". But there are problems with the imagery and with the message that it may convey, ankle pain from sickles being the least of them.
Consider the implications of this part of our text: …the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe. What is your first instinctive interpretation of this? A final harvest? Well, that is what you are meant to imply. You are meant to infer a corporate judgement at the end of time. The Book of Revelation is all about the Last Things, and the image of the harvest at the end of the year, when things are "ripe" for harvesting, fits this interpretation well. But it does not necessarily fit well with other images of the harvest in the bible or with the way that human life unfolds upon the earth, generation after generation.
The clue is in the much earlier story of Noah, and in the promise of the rainbow and all that it was to portend. Hear what God says to Noah: While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease. What Noah was promised was not one final harvest, but a succession of harvests and, indeed, of all the seasons, year by year, age by age. All over the world, this would happen. Century by century, this would happen. God promised to sustain each life and each generation by the fruitfulness of the earth. There would be a succession of Springs – a continuity of birth and new life. There would be a succession of Summers – a continuity of maturity and of coming to fruitfulness. There would be a succession of Autumns – a continuity of harvest and of the ingathering that harvest brings.
Can you see what is happening with the imagery here? In the Book of Revelation, there is one passage of the seasons where harvest-time is seen at the end of all time. In the Book of Genesis, there is a succession of the passage of the seasons, a succession of individual lives upon the earth, a succession of its ending and of the harvest ingathering beyond its ending.
Now, this fits so well with the way in which we speak of each individual human life as having its own individual seasons. We speak of the Springtime of our life, and of the High Summer of our days. We refer to our Autumn years, and, as the hymn-writers remind us, to the harvest-time of those days: May we the angel-reaping o'er, stand at the last accepted, Christ's golden sheaves for evermore to garners bright elected. Yes, the angel will come, but will take each sheaf in the readiness of its days. When I am in the Autumn of my life, my children are in the High Summer of their days, and my grandchildren (if I am blessed to have them) will be in the Springtime of their lives.
Christians are reluctant to speak of the Winter of their lives. Perhaps it is superfluous to do so when the harvest is the key moment when the angel's step falls softly beside our own. Saint Paul spoke of the seed sown in the ground, apparently without life, but when he recapitulated his teaching on the resurrection in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, he spoke of the individual being "swallowed up by life". The Winter was to be scarcely more than the three days between Good Friday and Easter Day.
Put in your sickle, and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe. We hear our text from the time in the life of the Church when persecution in the Roman Empire was threatening to overwhelm it. A final account, a final harvest, was anticipated, to draw a line under the sufferings of good and decent souls. But, for us, God will decide when each life's seasons have run their earthly course, when each life's harvest is ripe… and in the meantime, we shall thank him for all that sustains us and, particularly the knowledge that, as William Chatterton Dix wrote…