One of my earliest experiences in belonging to this church was taking one of the younger Sunday School groups for the Harvest Festival. We did not then have All Age Eucharists, so something was needed to occupy the children for most of the 10.30 service. My idea was to ask what harvest festival would have been like for Jesus, and attempt to recreate it. There was an easy answer to the question, as the Jewish festival of Succot is, among other things a harvest thanksgiving.
It was, however, those other things which attracted me to Succot for the Sunday School. As you probably know, Succot means “booths” or “arbours” and during the festival the Jews construct temporary shelters in which they symbolically, and sometimes actually, camp during the week of the festival. Some of my happiest memories are of camping holidays and of constructing camps in our garden and I love ambitious projects involving cardboard, scissors and glue. So we had a splendid time cutting out willow, palms and myrtle branches and 3D etrogs (a citrus fruit which looks like a cross between a lemon and an ugli fruit. Mine were particularly impressive). I admit that as a theology lesson, it wasn’t, perhaps, an unequivocal success.
It was not, however, only the opportunities for overambitious and complicated craft that attracted me to look at Succot. It was also the embarrassment and guilt implicit in our harvest celebration. Embarrassment because most of us know nothing of gathering in the harvest. We have only a romantic and outdated idea of wheat sheaves and haystacks gleaned from late French 19th Century painting and English novels, propped up by all those dusty old wooden tools one finds in sleepy provincial museums. Some of you own allotments and have the pleasant labour of growing vegetables and fruit that certainly tastes better; but allotment owners would admit that theirs is essentially a leisure activity. We buy our staples at the supermarket. We do not feel any urgent need to give thanks for the harvest as we have played no part in getting it in; very few people have. Walking though arable country on holiday this summer we were struck by the vast fields which we walked past which would have required armies of reapers; they were cleared in an afternoon by a single man in a combine harvester.
Beside the embarrassment of irrelevance, is the guilt underlying a harvest festival. We are very conscious that while we are thanking God for abundance, millions are starving. Furthermore, we have become increasingly aware that the abundance that we enjoy comes at terrible price in the destruction of the natural world and the upsetting of its delicate systems. We understand that to be grateful without any recognition of deprivation or cost would be meaningless and Harvest Festival is for us a time of generosity and gratitude, but a residual feeling of guilt remains.
I hoped that looking at the traditions of Succot would help to resolve some of these uncomfortable feelings.
The booths or arbours are intended to remind the Jews of their wandering for forty years in the wilderness; they are equally a reminder, by way of contrast, that harvesting grain, grapes, olives and fruit pre-supposes settlement and long term stability but that this a state that should not be taken for granted.
The booths are also used for entertaining friends and family and at meals taken in them, an extra place is left for an unexpected guest. Entertaining is, perhaps, a feature of any holiday period but it has a particular significance when the bonds of family and community are fragile, as they are in a nomadic existence. The great importance of hospitality in middle eastern culture, and which is so central to the stories of Genesis, rests on this fragility of society; hospitality matters most when people wander around and cannot rely on home comfort or support. Equally, hospitality is a feature of social cohesion, vital when the community is threatened as it was in the forty years wandering in a hostile wilderness. The temporary decampment into shacks in the garden serves as reminder of the permanence and solidity of the society we live in; a stability which the Jews of the 20th, and previous, centuries know cannot be taken for granted.
This theme is again emphasised in the traditional reading of the book of Ecclesiastes during Succot; the author of the Ecclesiastes takes nothing for granted, wealth, well being, happiness are all vanity. There is nothing permanent and nothing new. Human life is fragile and fugitive. Our self confidence may be knocked down as easily as makeshift tent in a garden.
Finally, there is an element of nostalgia and seeking for the good, simple, primeval and primitive life. One of the few things that Rousseau and Voltaire agreed about was the nobility of the simple life and garden cultivation became an ideal as symbolic of an untainted primeval state. In both cases there was a strong dose of hypocrisy, but that does not invalidate the longing which most of us share when we sing about ploughing fields and scattering the good seed on the land. Nostalgia means literally the pain of homecoming; the booths are charming but not very comfortable. The same is true of camping, especially if you are getting ever closer to 60. But the discomfort is part of the experience; it wouldn’t be same without it and that is the nature of nostalgia; it is a necessary even satisfying pain because we feel somehow that it is part of being where we really belong.
Harvest Festival is Christian celebration; there is no notion of the incarnation in the Jewish Succot and the idea of God taking human form is not immediately relevant to our thanksgiving for the fruits which we enjoy. There is a pointer, however, in Paul’s description of the risen Christ as “the first fruits” and I believe there are aspects of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection for which there are helpful parallels in the themes of Succot.
First, the extreme fragility of Our Lord’s existence on earth has parallels with transience and instability of the wandering in the wilderness. At the two ends of his earthly life he is first a naked nearly illegitimate, vulnerable baby in a manger and at the end he is a criminal outcast nailed to a cross. In the life in between we read only of restless journeys equipped with one shirt and no provision for the morrow. It was a life full of hostility and controversy, and yet he is also an example of what men and women may be, a noble and simple ideal of loving and healing, giving new meaning to hospitality and neighbourliness; Jesus’ life was an ideal as was that of the primitive wandering Israelites. And in the end, as his life comes to fruition we see that in passing through mortality he has given meaning and permanence to our fragile and sometimes seemingly futile existence.
As we thank God for the fruits of his creation we reflect too on the damage we have caused, but recognise that growth and life itself presuppose decay and mortality. So too our gratitude for the food we eat will be hollow unless we remember those who starve and turn that gratitude into generosity. We remember that our earthly existence is indeed transient and vain and that there is pain at its heart as well as joy. And we should remember that noble simplicity is as desirable as sophisticated abundance. I suggest that we should approach our harvest celebrations as an Easter people empowered by the resurrection to tackle and turn to good the pain in the world. Harvest Festivals are also feasts, and in a way we were feasting as a Parish at lunch today. That feast was reflection, however faint, of the heavenly feast that symbol of the kingdom. It is a feast to which we are all invited, indeed one which Jesus insists we should attend. May we all accept that invitation. Amen.