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September 2023 September 2023
BISHOP’S LETTER

God’s own field

Harvest, in the agricultural sense, is well past. All
is safely (or soggily) gathered in and the
appealing blocks of barley and hay baling our
landscape into a pop-up sculpture park have all
but disappeared.
The Church’s Harvest celebrations – extended as
a ‘Creationtide’ season into October – are in
one sense, then, a delayed thanksgiving for the
yield of former months. That needn’t trouble us,
however, for they are just as much focused on a
rather less specific future point: the anticipated
end of the world believers know as the Last
Judgement. For many, this is merely one of the
vestiges of a Christian worldview with little

bearing on present times, a
sickle blade blunted by
unbelief.
Nevertheless, the idea of a
harvest that separates the
righteous from the unrighteous
often crops up in Jesus’
teaching and has gained a
new edge as we witness the
ecological ends of our
actions, more fearfully evident
with each passing, and slightly
warmer, year. The once-
familiar Parable of the Wheat and the Tares tells us that good and evil inevitably
grow together in this life: one is easy to mistake for the other and this fact should
caution us away from prejudice or self-righteousness. But it is also a warning that
the real myth is the one that imagines our actions have no lasting or eternal
consequences. They do, they will - and to ignore this is simply to hasten the day.

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