As Harvest Festival comes, my thoughts turn to the hymns that are traditionally used in churches at various times of the year. Harvest is one example. Christmas is another.
Sometimes these hymns have hardly anything that is Christian about them. A friend of mine takes a carefully chosen song book to Christmas carol events. If anyone requests “The holly and the ivy”, with its partly pagan and partly folk-religion content, he simply replies, “We can’t sing that – it’s not in the book!”
Festival hymns are not all like that. There are some good meaty Christmas hymns. “Hark! The herald angels sing” has sound scripture content. A real gospel hymn to sing at harvest time is “Come, ye thankful people, come”. The second verse takes us from harvest thanksgiving to the fact that the whole human race is meant to be a harvest for God: “All the world is God’s own field/fruit unto His praise to yield”. The rest of the hymn is inspired by Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30). The wheat and the weeds (weeds meaning unbelievers) cannot be separated while they are growing. But the decisive moment of the harvest arrives, and the wheat is stored and the weeds burned.
Some writers have heavily criticised this hymn. Erik Routley writes: “Can one sing so blithely about the fearful implications of the last judgement? Ought one to attempt to do so on a cheerful creaturely festival like Harvest or Thanksgiving?”
Surely we should welcome a hymn that brings this reality home. Harvest is a pivotal time. In olden days a good harvest meant full stomachs over the winter, while a bad one meant that the spectre of starvation haunted the home for months. The run-up to the harvest of the last judgment is equally a time of decision for humankind. Do I belong to Christ or don’t I? Will I see eternal gain or eternal loss? The hymn invites us to make up our minds in good time.
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