Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning. A happy side effect of our summer heatwave has been the discovery up and down the country of numerous unexpected archaeological sites. Soil disturbed by human activity, even prehistoric activity, retains extra moisture which crops register as they grow - so that from the air one can look down on spectacular patterns, which appear almost like maps, of Neolithic ceremonial pathways, Iron Age settlements, square burial mounds and of the first farming in the British Isles from 3000 years ago or thereabouts. Most of these patterns are too beautiful to be referred to as scars, and yet like the marks a boxer carries, they are signs of earlier wounds. At some time in our distant past, hunter gatherers were displaced by settled agrarian societies in which wheat and barley were new and crucial crops. The fruitfulness of these crops made the transition both possible and desirable. And yet that switch was fateful, for once land was farmed, it needed to be possessed and so became a source of contention. Agriculture facilitated new forms of community life, which were nonetheless blighted by new occasions for conflict and violence. I find it rather striking then, that in Mark’s Gospel the first extended and explicit teaching which Christ delivers, is a parable about a sower, that revolutionary figure at the dawn of human history. The parable tells of the fate of the seed which the sower scatters on the ground; some of it bears fruit, but some of it, falling on the road side, on stony ground, or among thorns, comes to nothing. The seed stands for Christ’s word, taken up or rejected as the case may be – but the parable does not spell out what the fruitfulness of that seed symbolizes. What is the great harvest at which Christ, the sower of the word, aims? The Gospel tells us that Christ taught the crowd from a boat on the Sea of Galilee, to which he had resorted to avoid the crush of those who are flocking after him – but if you imagine the scene, it provides him with an ideal back drop. Behind his head you would have seen one of those perfect horizons where sky and sea, heaven and earth, meet. And it was this meeting of heaven and earth which Christ proclaimed when he spoke of the coming of the kingdom of God, and the harvest he sought. Under God’s rule, the earth, which had lost sight of that great horizon, would renounce the conflict and violence to which the sowing of seed led– and which continues down to our day in ever lively disputes over the having, holding and holding on to, of land and goods. From the skies, with a God’s eye view, we can look down and see our past (historic and prehistoric), with all its scars. I guess the discovery of early farms may seem less glamorous than the discovery of ceremonial pathways and burial mounds and the like – but then again, the sorry truth is that those more romantic items may actually have functioned as rather grand and threatening boundary markers in the sort of conflicts which, unfortunately, do not lie only in our past.