Bumper Crop?

"Howard, look! It looks like an ocean!" I exclaimed yesterday as we drove across the countryside of the Oklahoma wheat lands. It was true. As far as the eye could see, it was a sea of green as the vast fields roiled in swells and undulating waves in the stiff wind.

I thought of the line in the patriotic song, America the Beautiful, "How beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain..." The fields were beginning to show a tinge of amber, looking like the yellow-green froth of ocean waves atop the stalks as they ripened for June's harvest, scarcely a month away.

The local newspaper heralded in a headline the other day that the coming crop is "Outstanding, So Far!" All hopes and expectations are for a bumper harvest. It won't be long until it seems the aroma of oven-fresh bread can be detected as the golden kernels bake in the sun waiting for the threshing of the combine.

Jesus said in John 4:35, "Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest?" A notation I read says this was probably a proverb of that day meaning that there was no hurry to perform a task. On the contrary, Jesus states in the rest of the verse, "Behold, I say unto you, lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest."

Again, in Matthew 9:36, the Bible says that Jesus was moved with compassion when he saw the multitudes who had followed him as he preached the gospel and healed their sicknesses and diseases, because they were as sheep having no shepherd. "Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest," Matthew 9:37,38.

When my brothers were growing up in the fifties, as strong youths they would often work in the harvest, sometimes following the reapers to work in neighboring states as the harvest progressed northward, starting from the wheatlands in Texas through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and beyond. All hands were needed to bring in the harvest.

They returned home several weeks later, bronzed and muscular, with the satisfaction of their pay filling their pockets. In a spiritual context, Jesus continues in John 4:36, "And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together." Our work is cut out for us!