Luke 10: 1-9 | Pieter Breughel the Elder | The harvest is rich but the labourers are few

Luke 10: 1-9   The harvest is rich but the labourers are few

The Harvesters,  Painting by Pieter Breughel the Elder (1525-1569),  Oil on wood panel, Painted in 1565, © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York The Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them out ahead of him, in pairs, to all the towns and places he himself was to visit. He said to them, ‘The harvest is rich but the labourers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers to his harvest. Start off now, but remember, I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. Carry no purse, no haversack, no sandals. Salute no one on the road. Whatever house you go into, let your first words be, “Peace to this house!” And if a man of peace lives there, your peace will go and rest on him; if not, it will come back to you. Stay in the same house, taking what food and drink they have to offer, for the labourer deserves his wages; do not move from house to house. Whenever you go into a town where they make you welcome, eat what is set before you. Cure those in it who are sick, and say, “The kingdom of God is very near to you.”’   READ MORE     Reflection on the Painting In today’s reading we hear about Jesus sending His followers on a mission, so they can spread His word, throughout all the lands and throughout the centuries, even today. He sent out His followers in pairs, so that together they would achieve more than just on their own. So we are all little ambassadors helping to spread His Word. But when people meet us, do they think of us that we share the Good News? The privatisation of our faith in recent years, where most of us as Christians have become rather shy about sharing our faith, and rather live and worship in private, is not what we are supposed to do in our apostolic mission that Jesus calls us to in today’s reading. But let’s focus briefly on that sentence ‘The harvest is rich but the labourers are few’, in St Luke’s Gospel of today. To me this image of the harvest suggests an ‘urgency’ regarding our apostolic mission that most of us Christians no longer feel. For a farmer, the harvest-time is the most urgent season of the year, where the crops are fully grown and there is only a short window to harvest them in. Whilst we can get small things wrong regarding many different aspects of our lives, a lot of those small mistakes won’t have big consequences. However, when talking about the harvest (our faith, our salvation, our apostolic mission) the failure of harvesting properly would lead to very dire, disastrous consequences for the farmer: starvation, bankruptcy, unemployment… Today, many of us Christians have trouble believing that failure to accept our missionary responsibilities can have similarly disastrous consequences. The painting, which is at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and always a joy to see there, is a charming scene by Pieter Breughel the Elder. The focus in the painting is on the peasants; some are harvesting and some are eating, thus showing both the production and consumption of food. We further see a person shaking an apple tree on the right. They all work together, united, producing and consuming together, all enjoying a fruits of nature which urgently needed harvesting. by Patrick van der Vorst