Jesus says the above after the Samaritan woman remarks
“I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is
coming. When he comes he will explain everything
to us.” Shortly afterwards she said
to the Samaritan people: “…Could this be the Messiah?” They came out
of the town and made their way towards him (Verses 25, 29,30). It is clear that one reason Jesus said “They
are ripe for harvest” is that the people had been put into an open and
receptive frame of mind. They had been
taught to expect a Messiah in the first place.
In this one sense at least, the harvest was ripe.
I think of Martin Luther King, Jr. who was the prophetic
minister to the nation during the civil rights movement. An essential reason he was able to convict
the consciences of many whites living in a segregated society was that the
ground had been laid for many years through weekly sermons in myriad pulpits
regarding the love of God, the personhood of Jesus, and the cogency of the
Golden Rule. Add to that the familiar story
of Moses and the wrongful slavery of the Jewish people, and it is clear that
the harvest if not ripe was in many ways prepared and simply awaited a man of
conviction to appeal to deeply held if latent convictions and beliefs.
We are now in a political season and it often sounds
as if the public is ripe for harvest—but a strange harvest indeed. For the public, rather than pictured as
population with much fruit and gifts to bring to the table, is pictured as inherently
barren waiting for the many promises and largess of a politician. It is a crop to be exploited for deep-seated
resentment and fears rather than to be tapped for the many years of loving
investments made by relatives, friends, and institutions in the wellbeing of
individuals; this towards the end of a bountiful fruition manifested within
enriched and passionate lives. Politics too
often is simply a matter of appealing to our worst rather than our best—to seeing
us as takers rather than givers, as hoarders of bitter fruit rather than participants
in abundant living, as graspers at straws rather than as resolute givers of
life. I look for a transformative leader
and by this I mean a leader who like MLK has the ability to appeal to our best
no matter what the personal cost.
