SUPERNATURAL HARVEST
Do you not say, “Four months more and then the harvest”? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. John 4:35.
Imagine the disciples’ surprise, when they arrived back from the village of Sychar where they had gone to buy lunch, to find Jesus deep in conversation with a Samaritan woman. They were reticent to question Him. Instead, they urged Him to eat, but His mind was still mulling over the encounter He had just had with the woman and the stunning outcome it had produced. His response was almost as though He were talking to Himself. “Doing God’s will is more satisfying than just eating lunch,” He murmured.
In the meantime, the women abandoned her water jar in her haste to tell the villagers of her life-changing encounter with a Jewish rabbi who said He was the Messiah. Gone was her guilt, her shame, and her embarrassment in the presence of the other villagers. She sought them out, instead, to announce her discovery and to invite them to share her joy.
To His disciples Jesus proceeded to explain a spiritual principle that needs to be taken out of the context of a missionary appeal that we often put it into, and placed where it belongs – in the ordinary, everyday encounters that we have with people who, like the Samaritan woman, are thirsty for “living water” but are drinking at the wrong fountain. By offering her water that would forever quench her thirst, Jesus sowed a seed which, unlike natural seed, which takes time to mature into a harvest, had the power to produce new life within minutes.
In that one short encounter, a lonely, guilt-ridden woman was transformed into a new creation, forgiven, cleansed, and filled with joy, her thirst quenched and satisfied by a new love that would enable her to become a woman of dignity and beauty and a worshipper of the true God because she was fully accepted and loved by God.
Ephraim, the Syrian, in the 4th century, said, “Jesus came to the fountain as a hunter. He threw in the grain before one pigeon that He might catch the whole flock. At the beginning of the conversation, He did not make Himself known to her, but first she caught sight of a thirsty man, then a Jew, then a rabbi, then afterwards a prophet, last of all, the Messiah. She tried to get the better of the thirsty man, she showed her dislike for the Jew, she heckled the rabbi, she was swept off her feet by the prophet, she adored the Christ.”
How this should encourage us, who want to follow and imitate Jesus, to believe that the word of God, sown into the soil of the human heart, has the power to awaken desire and to produce a harvest of new life, not in “four months” but the moment that soul believes that Jesus is the Christ, Son of the living God.