Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
(Matthew 9:35-38, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
I want to believe the good news of the kingdom.
I want to believe in the plentiful harvest. I want to believe that enough laborers will come forward to bring that harvest in. I want to believe that Quakers will make up a good part—but by no means the only part—of that workforce. Okay, that part I can believe readily enough. As far as the rest of it goes, however, this world sorely tests my faith.
Well, I write that, because (I hope) it makes for a catchy opening, but the more I sit with that thought, and try to figure out where to take it, I start to recognize that I do possess a good deal of faith in our ability to create a blessed community whose members will reap the rewards of a covenant grounded in loving God and loving their neighbors as themselves.
We face a great many temptations that lure us away from those commitments—and we often stumble, as people have stumbled for millennia before us. Nevertheless, some of us still manage to see through the false promises of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, to borrow the Black social philosopher bell hooks’s meticulously detailed phrase. It feels to me like more people have been coming to that realization lately, although a personal confirmation bias toward optimism might have something to do with that feeling. Even if I do see hopeful circumstances more clearly because I want to maintain hope, though, that doesn’t make those circumstances unreal.
I think about those “harassed and helpless” crowds who came out for Jesus.
They didn’t fill the synagogues, public squares, and hillsides where Jesus spoke because they craved entertainment. They sought him out because their lives in an oppressive regime had become unbearable, because they could not imagine a viable means of escape until he came to show them a new possibility—or, rather, a reminder of a covenant from which they had strayed.
Like the seventeenth-century Quaker minister James Nayler would say of his own generation, as a conquered nation Judaea “[could] no longer hear the voice or understand the mind of the eternal Spirit (by which they were created), but [had] become open enemies to every check and reproof of the Spirit was which given to lead them to God.” As individuals, however, some began to recognize that the “ways, fashions, and customs” of empire “[were] not how God ordered man to live in the beginning.” They might not know how not to live this way, but they knew they could have a different life.
Jesus offered them the same invitation that Nayler described to his peerss:
“They must war against whatever is not of God, whatever the eye (which loves the world) lusts after, whatever the flesh takes delight in, and whatever stands as a respecter of persons… These are not of God, and whatever the god of this world has begotten in men’s hears to practice or contend for—yes, whatever God did not place there—all this the Lamb and His followers must war against, and they must be at enmity with it both in themselves and wherever they see it.”
Whether we acknowledge Jesus as the Christ or not, each of us must reckon with a similar invitation today. And I can’t shake the mental image of those harassed and helpless crowds.
Because we see those same crowds all around the world today.
We’ve seen what happens when a large group of people feels a vast lack in their lives—whether they suffer from immediate material want, or have attained some material success but still find themselves emotionally and spiritually wanting. We know what comes of shepherds showing up and offering to fill that lack with security and material comfort, promising to make their lives great “again.”
“Oh that with the light of Christ in your own hearts you would see how the world’s lusts have spoiled your souls of the heavenly image,” James Nayler lamented, “and the spirit of the world has captivated your minds to itself and its likeness.” I imagine most of the people who follow this newsletter have felt a similar disappointment in contemporary society at one point or another, perhaps even an series of points that stretches out into a thick line. Maybe you don’t invoke Christ, but you’ve looked out at the world as it stands and you’ve wished for something better.
Well, the harvest of the blessed community awaits—what will we do to pitch in and bring it home?
As a non-practicing person with a 98% ideological match I’m drawn to Quakerism in part for its lack of evangelism. Evangelism without direct experience of God seems like nothing more than a lie. Do-gooder Christians of other denominations have gone out into the world and spread their poison far and wide. At some point people stop believing that anyone has direct communion with God. Maybe I’m at that point. How can a broken ideology ever bring about good? Is it just creating scar tissue around hearts that prevents the real spirit of Jesus from entering it? If Quakers want to take up the torch then its going to take something extraordinary to undo what other Christians have done.
I don’t care for the expression “war against.”