Year: 2022

“For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven,
and giveth life unto the world”

Harvest festivals are an ancient and integral feature of the civilizations of the world. They belong to the universal acknowledgment of “the givenness of things” in Marilynne Robinson’s apt phrase. Harvest festivals celebrate in one way or another the nature of our human interaction with the created order and the recognition that the harvest cannot be taken for granted. The harvest is a gift, not a right, not an entitlement.

Harvest festivals belong to human reflection about ourselves in relation to the natural world. We are essentially intellectual and spiritual beings embodied and embedded in cultures. Harvest festivals are one of the ways in which that intellectual and spiritual reality about our humanity shows itself culturally and historically. The great Medieval cathedrals, for instance, often depict the labours of the months as tagged to the signs of the zodiac thus showing the interaction of human labour with the seasons of the year in terms of planting, vine-dressing, and harvesting, especially of grain and grapes; hence the symbolic and sacramental significance of bread and wine.

It might come as a bit of a surprise, then, to discover that there were no provisions for Harvest Thanksgiving services in the classical Books of Common Prayer. Such services were only introduced in 1862 in England. The provisions for “A Form of Thanksgiving for the Blessings of Harvest” only appeared in Anglican Prayer Books in the 20th century. In other words, it is an entirely modern development.

Why? The classical and traditional pattern of the church year by no means ignores the cycles of nature: there is Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation, there are the Ember Days in each of the four seasons, August 1st is Lammas Day or ‘Loaf-Mass day’ which celebrates the first-fruits of the grain harvest. Various prayers and Collects reference the goodness of creation as an expression of the goodness of God. There are prayers ‘For Rain’, and ‘For Fair Weather’, prayers, too, ‘In Time of dearth and famine’. And there are Thanksgiving prayers ‘For Rain’, ‘For Fair Weather’, and ‘For Plenty’ in terms of the “special bounty” of “our land yield[ing] to us her fruits of increase” (BCP, 1662).

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“That you may know the love of Christ that passeth knowledge”

We meet on Angel’s wings in Micahelmastide to ponder the mysteries of God’s love and of our lives as embraced in “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”. Michaelmas belongs to a rich tradition of reflection about what it means to be human; in short, it contributes to a form of ‘theological anthropology’, to how we think and understand our humanity as grounded in God. So, too, in today’s readings, we are being reminded in profound ways that we are intellectual and spiritual creatures, creatures whose very being is caught up in the activities of knowing and loving. The interplay of knowledge and love contributes to a more comprehensive and a larger view of our humanity, to the ontology of love rather than merely power.

God’s question to Job is particularly suggestive and arresting. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job. 38. 4, 7). The morning stars and the sons of God are the Angels. They testify to the spiritual and intellectual nature of reality. We are one with the Angels in thinking the things of God in nature and in human affairs; we are together with them in the same house of the spirit, they above stairs and we below stairs, in Mark Frank’s lovely image. Angels, like us, are spiritual and intellectual beings but, unlike us, they are invisible and immaterial realities. We are embodied creatures; they are not. They are the pure thoughts of God in creation and in redemption, non spatial and sempiternal.

God’s question to Job echoes God’s first question to us in the Garden of Eden. “Where are you?” God asks (Gen. 3. 9). Not because he doesn’t know but because his question awakens us to self-consciousness, to the idea of knowing that we know. It is about who we are. Yet our awakening to self-consciousness happens through disobedience and separation, through contradiction and the denial of what we, in some sense, know; in short, through our presumption. ‘Adam, our humanity, is given a commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen. 2.17). The serpent, later identified as Satan, the Devil, the great dragon, asks the very first question of the Scriptures. “Did God say?” (Gen. 3.1) But we know what God said. The serpent is simply an aspect of our being as spiritual and intellectual creatures who seek to know. Such is our nature. Man by nature, Aristotle famously says, desires to know. But in what way? Everything turns on that question.

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