Harvest – an abundance that empties us

Harvest – an abundance that empties us A homily for Harvest, 5 October 2025 Reading – select verses from Job 38-40 It has become commonplace to lump together the Church’s thanksgiving for the harvest with a more general celebration of God as Creator. This is after all a starting-point for all Christian theology: God commands the universe into existence by speaking into the empty desolation his great cry of ‘Fiat lux! Let there be light!’ And light there was, as the prerequisite of all things. And God goes on sustaining all that is; which is why, in a nutshell, you can put your cup of tea down on the kitchen table in reasonable confidence that it will stay there: the cup on the table, the table on the floor, the floor on the foundations, and so on and on, back to God’s providential care of all that has come into being. For Christians, this central idea of God as Creator marks out the white lines on the playing-field, establishing our identities and duties in relation to God and to each other. It is because God is the source and sustainer of all things that an attitude of profound gratitude is absolutely required, with zero sense of entitlement even from all those self-made men and women who like to say that they have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. And because this wildly abundant and vastly varied provision has been made to all people (to all species, one ought to say), then the moral obligation to share resources is equally obvious. If I am not the source of all things, why on earth do I get to hoard so many of them? It is therefore from our beliefs about God as Creator that we have developed ideas about ‘dominion and stewardship,’ biblical terms that remind humanity that mastery of creation involves proper care and responsibility for it (Genesis 1.28, 2.15). As the Assisi Declaration of 1986 put it, humankind has no ‘licence to abuse, spoil, or squander’ the earth’s riches. Pope Francis reiterated this in Laudato Si (his 2016 letter to the world): we humans must ‘forcefully reject the notion of absolute domination’ on earth. This care for Creation, gratitude to God, and concern for each other will encourage us to pursue ways of peace and justice; and to encourage leaders of nations to do the same. It will also help to rid us of the ‘fat relentless ego’ (Iris Murdoch), emptying us of stultifying and infantilizing self-obsession, filling us instead with the grace of God, thus enabling us to grow in wisdom and maturity. And so we are reminded that harvest is one of the symbols Jesus uses to refer to the great and final Day of Judgement when all the good wheat will be gathered into God's granary. Pray that we might participate in – and learn from – our own local harvest thanksgiving, so that we come to participate in that final harvest, when we shall have been emptied of ourselves completely, to be filled only with the love, light and life of God our Creator.