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2007-02-20 issue:

The harvest of peace

A reflection on Luke 10:1-12

by Jane Stoltzfus Buller

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Reading Luke 10:1-12 with the executive board of the Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference over an 18-month period was a gift. You may think reading one text every meeting and reflecting on the same words every time we got together became old. However, it led me to new understanding about our mission as disciples of Jesus. One question helps me grasp what Jesus’ ministry and message of good news meant for his time and ours: What is that plentiful harvest Jesus talks about as he sends out the disciples as laborers, sheep among wolves?

A common interpretation is that the harvest is individuals. Our mission is to bring individuals into the barn, the church. We are to move out among the peoples and find those ready for harvesting, ready to accept Jesus. We then offer the salvation ABCs and invite them to join the church, live as believers, repent of their sin and move into a new way of life. They have been cut or harvested for something new, the community of believers, leaving their old way behind. They have been harvested for salvation, harvested for heaven.

As I read these verses over and over, something new took hold of my imagination. It began in the instructions Jesus gives. The disciples are to say, “Peace to this house.” Peace is offered and received, bread and board are shared. The sick are healed, and the nearness of the reign of God is announced. A new concept of labor and harvest emerged from these instructions to stay put, eat and drink what is provided, and be near as the reign of God.

The idea of harvesting peace grabbed my attention and imagination. It connects with the vision of the God who throughout history seeks to establish a community of people living together in righteousness. It is a vision of shalom, a theme carried throughout the Bible. All through the story of God with God’s people is an emphasis on establishing a shalom community where God’s justice and peace are extended to the whole world. It is the experience we long for, the new Jerusalem promised through Jesus Christ. This concept of peace is not an absence of war but a way of living that embraces life and nurtures the fullness of life in whatever and whoever we are connected to.

Broken world: If the harvest and the plentiful crop ready for harvest is shalom, how does that change the way we live and work in this violent and broken world? What does the good news mean as a harvest of peace?

If we seek to harvest peace, we labor within ourselves. When we think of others as the harvest, the labor becomes an effort to change the other person—their beliefs or way of life.

We are dependent on their choices and responses. But if we think about the labor as an effort toward a harvest of peace, the work is in ourselves. We labor to be peace. We labor in ourselves to respond, to act peacefully. Jesus said to go out to the towns and be peace—live together with those you meet, eat the food served, offer gifts of healing and presence, name the nearness of God. Being with others as “little Christs” is the labor we are called to. Then what is already present and waiting to be harvested among the people comes to fruition. It, too, is peace. And the reign of God grows.

The real possibility of not finding the harvest in a place leads Jesus to instruct the disciples not to waste time working where there will be no fruit. The emphasis is on harvesting peace, not dissension and discord. There will be places not ready to be harvested. The towns where no welcome is offered, where there is no fruit of peace to be harvested, will indeed be worse off than Sodom, for rather than the harvest of peace there will be violence, division, death and destruction. A living hell, as indeed we can see all around us today. Yet, perhaps in the future, at other times of harvest, those same towns, those same people, will welcome peace.

This understanding helps me broaden the idea of the harvest Jesus talks about. It opens up the possibilities in ways that are life-giving and hopeful. There are many points in our lives where all are able to labor for peace. Between and among our family groups. Between and among religious groups and ethnic groups. Where fear reigns. Where guns and violence are common.

Within each person and where each person meets another. With our earth and all life with which we share it. In each of these places of relationship, the labor is hard, the effort demands much from us, but the harvest is plentiful as peace impacts the life around it and reproduces itself from one person to another.

Lambs in the midst of wolves: Certainly there is truth in the way this sending text has been understood in the past. But I find myself envisioning the changed and transformed world we will inhabit if we labor at harvesting peace among ourselves and peace among those we meet. I get excited thinking about the difference such a labor may bring to our world. To go out, as lambs in the midst of wolves, carrying nothing but the peace we have received in Jesus and that we practice as we eat and drink, cure the sick and proclaim the reign of God among us. Being Christ’s peace right where we are. Right now.

What a possibility—to be co-laborers with God, harvesting a reign of peace. Our world is desperately in need of such labor. May we find the power and strength within us to labor for such a harvest.

Jane Stoltzfus Buller is a pastor at Walnut Hill Mennonite Church, Goshen, Ind.

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