The Harvest – Matthew 9:35-38

Dictionary.com defines harvesting as that season when ripened crops are gathered. This means the crops are at their maturity and need to be gathered before they begin to deteriorate and are no longer useful. Some ripened crops are easier than others to gather, but none of that happens without some real work. Someone has to go and do it.

Jesus is seeing person after person in need of shepherding toward the Lord, toward the kingdom, and he is not enough to bring in the entire harvest by himself. Harvesters need to be multiplied. He needs to be reproduced in order to accomplish this great task.

And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” (Matthew 9:35-38 ESV)

When we think of the world’s population we often think of the massively big cities that dot our planet.  But the hard-to-imagine huge number of people in the world reside in countless small towns and villages.  Jesus knew that each of those communities needed to hear the good news of the kingdom in their own little social system.  And he made the kingdom’s coming known by healing every disease and affliction.  This was a taste of the kingdom as it will be when it is fully come.  In the presence of the king no disease or affliction can remain.

Who was harassing these wayward sheep?  The Devil, to be sure!  And with him those whom he had influenced.  Many of the religious leaders of the day were quite capable of, as Jesus would say later (Matthew 23), either shutting the door to the kingdom on them or converting them to their own viewpoint and making them twice as much a child of hell as themselves.  So there was an amazingly large harvest of people on whom God had worked to bring consciousness of their need for a rescue and too few laborers to reach them.

And here is the challenge to discipleship that Matthew has included after each triad of miracles. The challenge to discipleship here is to do something about the vast harvest of people needing God’s help and healing, need their lives restored to relationship with the Father, and who are primed to receive the gospel. So Jesus instructs his followers to pray to the Lord of this harvest to send workers.

It seems next to impossible for me to pray for God to send harvesters into the fields without feeling that necessity laid upon me.  Like the disciples who labored all night but caught nothing until they obeyed Jesus and cast their nets on the other side of the boat, we can be laboring for the wrong thing or not laboring at all and never reach many or any for the harvest.  Lord, help me to cast my net.  Lord, help me to enter the harvest and reap at your direction.