Even Now He Harvests

Feb. 5th, 2021 | By Luke Bell PC ‘23

Pictured: coffee and water on a tray.

Farming is an expertise. Having lived on a farm in northeast Georgia, I speak from experience. Ever since I can remember, Angus cows, Massey Ferguson tractors, and southern rodeos have always been as commonplace to me as walking. Farming, however, is more than animals and machinery. It’s a mindset, a lifestyle, an art that takes decades to master.

The media, through pictures and advertisements, often portrays farming as a sentimental pastime. They display farmers fishing with grandkids against the backdrop of a sunset; plowing fields in air-conditioned cab tractors; and harvesting perfectly ripe crops from immaculate fields fit for the front cover of Farming Magazine. I’ve never known farming like that. 

In reality, farming is hard. Really hard. In commercials and advertisements, the audience never sees the arduous face of farming. They never see the freezing February rain soaking through your jacket as you work deep into the night, desperately distributing hay bales for your cows. They never see the blistering July sun roasting your back as you repair fences, hand-digging fence post holes while tightening, splicing, and cutting barbed wire that’s liable to lacerate your hands in one moment of inattention. They never see the waking up before dawn, going to bed after dusk, social plans cancelled due to unexpectedly long hours, and the emergency phone calls to impound stubborn cows who view fences as a suggestion. 

No, farming is altogether a different ordeal compared to media portrayals. Without experiencing the toil and exhaustion familiar to farmers everywhere, people might construct an incomplete picture of what farmers really do and who they really are. Knowing the stories they’ve lived, the people they’ve touched, the scars they bear, and dreams they chase is the only way to know who a farmer really is. 

It’s easy to make the same mistake with Jesus––the mistake of buying into an inaccurate and heavily doctored image of him. Today, a stereotypical picture of him looks something like this: long, luscious hair, smooth, pale complexion, perfectly groomed beard, and a flawlessly white garment made of the finest fabric. He is so ethereal and mystical in these portrayals, almost too aloof to concern himself with the affairs of earth. We seldom contemplate the raw humanity of his nature. 

The more accurate picture would have been this: cropped, curly hair; rugged, dark complexion, a slightly undomesticated beard, and a rough brown tunic made of cheap linen. His appearance was as average as a first-century Jew could get. Nothing about him would have disclosed his identity as God in human form. Concealed under this flesh and bone, however, was more than a carpenter, good moral teacher, or even an archetype of love and sacrifice. He was a Savior on a divine rescue mission, determined to save and redeem society’s most despised and rejected.

The landscape: first-century Palestine. The weather: scorchingly hot and arid. Following numerous miles of hiking through mountainous terrain, today’s agenda is a divine appointment with a most unexpected attendee. 

In approximately 30 AD, Jesus is traveling to Galilee from Jerusalem. The typical journey can be made either by hiking along the coastal route through the Plain of Sharon or crossing over the Jordan river and traveling across Perea, later circling to the eastern side of Galilee. Due to theological and racial tensions, Jews fastidiously avoid the shortest route between Jerusalem and Galilee. That route passes through Samaria, the region Jesus now seeks to enter.  

The Jews and Samaritans detest one another. After the Jewish exile from Israel in 722 BC, a remnant group of Jews remained in Palestine and constructed a hybrid form of Judaism. They moved the official place of worship from Jerusalem to Mount Gerizim, discarded nineteen of the twenty-four books of the traditional Jewish canon, but, worst of all, they intermarried with surrounding nations, diluting their Jewish identity. This was social (and religious) heresy in light of contemporary Jewish laws. Seven hundred years later, Jews view the Samaritans as the contemptible race of defectors who had betrayed their heritage. Samaritans view the Jews as the self-righteous, pious elite who spurn those who fall short of their theological and ancestral superiority. Violent confrontations between both ethnicities are not uncommon, so as Jesus travels into Samaria, he enters a region of virulent racial hostility. He is, in a sense, behind enemy lines. 

Having hiked nearly twenty miles through mountainous terrain, Jesus arrives in Samaria in a state of sheer exhaustion. Sweating profusely, he comes to the town of Sychar where he finds a well, sits down, and rests. He looks around. It’s noon, and the landscape is desolate. He sends his disciples to buy food from the nearby town while he stays on the outskirts near the well. He is all alone. 

Several minutes later, a Samaritan woman arrives to draw water. This is very strange. At that time, women usually gather together at dawn or dusk to retrieve water. The timing of their chore facilitates friendships among the town’s women and avoids the heat of the sun. This woman, however, comes alone in one of the hottest hours of the day. Her lone presence is unusual, and it is likely indicative of her disrepute among other women in town. 

Fastening the pulley’s hook onto her jar, the last thing she expects as she lowers it into the well is to interact with the mysterious man watching her. Jewish men—especially Jewish rabbis—do not publicly speak to women in first century Palestine. Moreover, Jews and Samaritans almost never interact due to racial and theological tension that conversation would exacerbate. That Jesus, a male Jewish rabbi, would interact with an outcast Samaritan woman would have been unthinkable. Jesus makes the first move to break the silence. 

“Will you give me a drink?” he asks politely. 

“You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman,” she snaps back.  “How can you ask me for a drink?”  

She is stunned by his willingness to break social customs. But Jesus is unfazed. In fact, he uses her resistance to introduce the real issue he seeks to address. 

“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water … Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 

Pivoting on the concept of water, Jesus calmly maneuvers from the physical to the spiritual, from the seen to the unseen, from the temporal to the eternal. This is His classic conversational strategy. Very carefully, He sows His words with spiritual seeds designed to implant a curiosity for the mysterious within the listener.  The water Jesus promises alleviates spiritual dehydration. It is the invitation to a relationship with himself so that whoever drinks of His water will satiate the deepest, yet often repressed,  thirst of the human soul––to know God. The woman recognizes the conversation’s paradigm shift, and she investigates. 

“Sir,” she says, “give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” 

Stopping here, one would expect Jesus to immediately give her the water. 

She seems willing to trust Him, so it only seems natural for Him to accept. This however, is the opposite of what Jesus does. Instead of offering the woman what she asks for, Jesus steers the conversation into a painful topic. 

“Go, call your husband and come back,” Jesus asks.

“I have no husband.”

“You are right when you say that you have no husband,” Jesus says. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” 

If a seed falls on cold, calloused soil, it will never take root. It might as well fall on concrete. To ensure the seed is not wasted, farmers plow the ground until it is tender enough to receive the seed. This is exactly what Jesus does. 

Jesus knows the baggage she carries from being a quintuple divorcee and current adulteress. He also knows that the facade the woman wishes to put up to conceal her guilt is the very thing that will hamper her ability to embrace his living water. So though it seems painful and even pitiless, he withholds his offer of eternal life until she relinquishes her past. She cannot have her shame and his living water simultaneously. She must choose one. Without opening her heart to embrace the seed of truth Jesus offers, her heart will never truly be at peace. And Jesus won’t let her stay like that.  

Now that she has been found out, she deflects Jesus’ doctoral diagnosis with a theological inquiry.

 “Sir,” she confesses, “I can see you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the only place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” 

She hopes to redirect the conversation into an abstract, impersonal controversy regarding worship. But Jesus knows exactly what she is doing. In fact, this is the direction he wants to go. Despite her resistance, Jesus has planted a seed, and it has lodged exactly in the place he sought to sow. He now waits patiently for its fruition.

“Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem… The time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks.”

Once again, Jesus uses His technique of transforming physical topics into spiritual realities. True worship, according to Him, is not about temples, mountains, or even religious atmospheres. True worship is to love God with mind and with heart, in spirit and in truth. That is what the Father seeks. That is why Jesus has come all the way to Samaria—to teach a lonely, guilt-ridden outcast what true worship really means. The seedlings are emerging, but the fruit has not yet yielded. 

“I know the Messiah is coming,” she confesses. “When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

She is cornered. In a desperate attempt to evade Jesus’ invitation, she proposes one last excuse. She objects that only the Messiah, the one who will come with an everlasting kingdom, will be the one she trusts. Until then, this conversation is over. 

This, however, is exactly what Jesus wanted. In seeking to discontinue the conversation, she inadvertently agreed to trust the very person speaking to her––the Messiah himself, and Jesus takes this opportunity. The buds are sprouting. 

“I who speak to you am he,” Jesus declares. 

As soon as he says this, his disciples return from gathering food. She is stunned. She cannot believe what she just heard, yet in a strange way, she does believe it. It is he, the Messiah, the one she has waited for her entire life. The sowing was successful; the fruit has yielded. 

Leaving her water jar, she runs into town and begins exclaiming that she has found the Messiah, the Savior of the world.  The disciples look over their shoulders at the Samaritan as she runs by, and then they turn to Jesus. They are clueless, but Jesus doesn’t respond. Instead, he watches the woman in the distance as she rejoices after taking her first sip of living water. A smile breaks across his face. 

Sitting down near the well, the disciples break and distribute the bread they just bought from the village. They also ask why on earth Jesus was talking to a Samaritan. The bread makes its round to Jesus, but he motions “No” with his hand. Looking around and remembering he has just hiked twenty miles, the disciples become concerned with Jesus’ health. 

“Rabbi, eat something,” they plead.  

“My food,” Jesus claims, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.”

Spiritual harvesting is not easy. In fact, without God’s intervention, it is impossible. For just one person, Jesus hiked over twenty miles, shattered contemporary mores, and pried into the most awkward and painful part of a woman’s life just to offer her living water. One person, one heart, one recipient of his salvation is worth all that sweat and toil.  

As a child, I was captivated by my dad’s farming expertise. Tractor, truck, fence, or barn, he knew how to repair any issue. I tried to help in these endeavours, but I frequently exacerbated the problem by mishearing his directions. My dad, however, would calmly walk over, explain the correct procedure, and effortlessly undo the mess I had made. I stood and watched in wonder. Somehow, he would repair in seconds what I thought impossible to accomplish. Jesus’ mastery is the same, though he works through spiritual techniques.

He is the skilled locator of souls and the master harvester––the expert farmer who does not till fields with a plow of iron but tills hearts with the words of life. He doesn’t sow with seeds of plants, but with seeds of his own truth. He doesn’t harvest crops for profit or gain, but He harvests people for worship and relationship. And until He redeems everyone willing to become a true worshipper of the living God, He will not stop tilling, sowing, and harvesting so that the sower and reaper may be glad together. Farming is an expertise. One can only marvel as they watch the expert Farmer.

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