Gathering

John 4:36

Welcome to the fifth installment of this study of the Gospel of John and its use of the terms ‘life’ and ‘eternal life.’ If Jesus wasn’t trying to establish a ‘kingdom,’ then what are the alternatives? I am examining the Fourth Gospel, traditionally attributed to ‘John,’ to tease out other ways of characterizing life as a follower of Jesus. You can see the beginning installments HERE and HERE.

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John 4:36. ‘The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.’

It’s almost a throw-away, that one sentence. It’s tossed casually into the middle of the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, into a pause between when she has left Jesus to go home, and when she returns with people from her community to come hear him.

https://freerangestock.com/photos/153062/thanksgiving-harvest-free-stock-photo.html

In that space the disciples return and urge Jesus to eat something. And instead of enjoying a snack, he tells them that he is already well fed, that he is doing the will of ‘the One who sent me,’ (code in this gospel for God), and this is nourishment enough.

Jesus then speaks about the harvest, the means by which his people cultivated their food.

In an agrarian society the work of raising crops involves, among other steps, sowing the seed and, later, reaping the crop at its fullest growth. Normally, as any gardener knows, these two steps are separated in time, and a successful crop depends on factors outside the control of the workers. Jesus here is pointing to a different kind of timeframe, one in which sower and reaper are working together, the crop is abundant, and the workers are rejoicing together at the gathering of fruit.

And it is in this context, of time compressed and joy shared, that Jesus indicates that the fruit being gathered is not an actual food crop, it is ‘for eternal life.’ That preposition translated ‘for’ here indicates a sense of purpose - that this fruit, this activity that he has been engaged in during their absence, exists so that ‘eternal life’ might be actualized.

And the verb here, synagó, ‘to bring together, to gather,’ applies not only to the fruits gathered in at the harvest, but to the workers who would normally be doing their tasks at separate times.

This bringing together of workers and fruits is intentional, purposeful. It is described in this way in order to bring about this thing John, through Jesus, is calling ‘eternal life.’

Earlier uses of ‘eternal life’ pointed to a kind of life that is light for the world, that demonstrates an intimacy between the human and the Divine, that is more-than our material existence, that experiences the breath of the Spirit as an animating force and water as a metaphor for movement and aliveness. Now we discover that eternal life is also a function of being gathered together, to be one with the work, the workers, and the fruits of one’s labor.

The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) used the language of ‘kingdom’ to describe a way of being in which God’s will and nature would be the principles on which human communities were ordered. I call that way of being a Community of Grace, a community which is less about organization and more about shared practices.

John is describing a way of being that is likewise focused not on structure or organization and more on a deep understanding of how the Spirit animates and energizes human lives. It’s about lives transformed and gathered together into a community that supports one another in their new understandings. Although the language and literary structure are very different from the other three gospels, the life followers are invited to live is very much the same.

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Back when I began this series on John I promised to connect what I was discovering in this gospel with my own lived experience of faith in the context of physical limitation and challenge. So far, I’ve only addressed that side of the question once, not because it’s not a very real issue for me, but because I tend to get jazzed about digging into Scripture more than about thinking about my upcoming joint replacements.

So let me try again with this short, sweet statement about sowing and reaping and gathering.

Eternal life here has to do with being gathered into something larger than myself, or myself and my co-hermit and husband, Charlie. So many folks have offered their support, their assistance, their prayers that I have unexpectedly felt gathered with invisible links into something I was not completely aware of before. Friends near and far, colleagues from my work at the hospital, family members, and prayers from my beloved community of Lindisfarne. As I observed to a friend just yesterday, it is as though we are being held by gossamer threads of love and care, connected at the level of the heart as we move through these challenges.

So yes, we are sarx and doxa - flesh and glory - we are breath and water - and we are gathered into an invisible community of love. And this is enough.

Blessings!