Harvest Festival is this Sunday at St Mary’s, Kings Worthy, and next Sunday, 11 October, at St Swithun’s, Headbourne Worthy. Please bring gifts for the Beacon which supports people in need and those experiencing homelessness in Winchester.
By all accounts, this year’s harvest will be poor — one of the worst on record — after drought and extreme heat. Food inflation may rise again, and some products may become harder to find. For many of us, this may be the first year the fragility of our food supply becomes visible. And yet nature still has a way of surprising us.
Every few years, oak and beech trees have what is called a “mast” year. Across whole counties, they suddenly produce a bumper crop of acorns and beech mast — sometimes a hundred times more than usual. Biologists call this “predator satiation”: the trees flood the wood with so much food that, even after every squirrel, bird and badger has eaten its fill, enough seed remains to grow the next generation of woodland. Life continues not through hoarding, but through extravagance. Abundance is generosity on a huge scale — a glimpse of the generosity of God.
At the other extreme is saffron, perhaps the smallest harvest of all. A crocus opens and offers just three fine red threads. It takes around 150 flowers to make a single gram, and tens of thousands to make a pound. Saffron is gathered thread by thread from something that gives only a little, and only briefly.
So harvest can speak of both abundance and scarcity. A smaller harvest may bring worry, frustration and inconvenience. But in our Gospel for Harvest Sunday, scarcity becomes something darker: a ‘harvest’ story turns into a story of violence, ending with a murder.
Jesus tells of a landowner who plants a vineyard, leases it to tenants and goes away. At harvest time, he sends servants to collect his share. The tenants beat one, kill another and stone a third. More servants are sent; the same thing happens. Finally, the landowner sends his son, thinking they will respect him. Instead, the tenants say, “This is the heir. Let’s kill him and take his inheritance.” So they seize him, throw him out of the vineyard and kill him.
It is a story about harvest turning violent because the tenants do not simply want the fruit; they want the vineyard outright. What they were asked to share feels like something being stolen from them.
Most of us are far removed from harvest now. A century ago, many people worked the land in some way; today, fewer than one per cent of the UK workforce works in agriculture. Food arrives boxed, washed and priced, several steps removed from soil. It would be comforting to think that distance makes us innocent of the tenants’ sin. But I don’t think it works like that.
WRAP’s (Waste & Resources Action Programme) recent figures suggest the UK throws away over ten million tonnes of food a year, around six million tonnes of it from our own kitchens, much of it still edible. Those numbers suggest we’re still grasping and grabbing, but simply don’t notice.
The tenants’ sin was the belief that whatever is placed in our hands becomes ours to keep, waste or refuse to share. Such a belief can survive in a kitchen bin, a hoarded surplus, or a quiet reluctance to let go of what was only ever lent.
And yet the landowner keeps sending. That is the strange mercy inside this violent parable. Harvest is not proof that we are entitled to what we have. It is evidence of a giver who keeps giving — sometimes in floods, sometimes thread by thread — to tenants still struggling to receive life as gift rather than seize it as prize.
This Harvest, may we learn to receive what God gives with gratitude, and to share it with generosity.
Revd Paul