Ordinary Time:  Industrial or Agricultural?

The Bible says that as long as earth endures, seedtime and harvest will never cease (Genesis 8:22). This verse tells us that God operates within seasons. Ordinary Time, too, is a season. It differs from the other liturgical seasons because it is agricultural in nature. It is about slow, steady growth, much like a farmer’s crop that slowly develops from seed into harvest.

Too often, contemporary believers have an industrial perspective of God. The Industrial Revolution manufactured items that have created a “have it now; have it my way” mentality. When prayer is viewed from a manufacturing perspective, it can warp a believer’s concept of God. A person brings their prayer list to him as if it were raw material. The prayer list then moves through the assembly line in heaven, with the sender hoping for a quick and rapid result. Others interpret Scripture through an industrial lens that focusses mainly on the times when Jesus healed all the sick in a village on a single night: People brought their sick to Jesus; he laid hands on them, and presto, they were healed. We claim specific verses in hopes that God will manufacture a product, the answer to the problem—and quickly. When anticipated answers are not immediate, however, doubt can take root, all because believers forget that God’s ways are agricultural rather than industrial.

God established his world with agricultural principles. His Word calls Jesus the Seed and the Branch. Many parables of Jesus use farming images and concepts. Agricultural and industrial Christianity differ in that the Kingdom Jesus spoke about comes through growth rather than manufacturing. Agricultural growth requires waiting. Growth takes seasons to produce the end result. Ordinary Time, too, is about growth, waiting and seasons. There is nothing industrial about this liturgical season. Agricultural Christianity uses ordinary days to accomplish extraordinary results. God plays the long game, and the long game is agricultural by nature.

Manufacturing reproduces a product. Agriculture multiplies the product. Manufacturing is faster than farming, but only farming has the ability within itself to multiply and reproduce again and again. In agricultural Christianity there are seasons to plant and seasons to weed, seasons to wait and seasons to harvest. There is a slow, steady rhythm to life established by our agricultural God.

Jesus told an ordinary, uninteresting tale of a landowner who planted wheat. The same night his enemy sowed tares in the same field. The farm workers discovered the problem after both kinds of seed had sprouted. They offered to weed out the tares while the crop is still young (industrial response), but the farmer revealed a heavenly, agricultural truth: Do NOT weed during this early season for fear of damaging the good sprouts. He shows us that his work is of far greater importance and value than the growth of wickedness. The owner said to wait until harvest when both good and evil were mature and then separate the two.

Believers today struggle with culture’s depravity. Contemporary perversion is oppressive and depressing until we recall the parable of the wheat and the tares. God removes evil only when it is fully grown, not before. Each time culture reaches a new moral low, we should actually be encouraged. God’s harvest must be very near. This short, banal parable now becomes intensely interesting.

Ordinary Time, too, is that slow, maturing growth time when Jesus shows us our hearts and within them, the wheat and tares that grow therein. During these times in our Christian development, when we think that we are growing worse rather than better, it may well be that we are, instead, about to experience a harvest. The wheat and tares grow together until …

Ordinary Time is agricultural in nature. This liturgical season is created so that we might discern the times and the seasons, reminding us that growth in Jesus cannot be rushed. Ordinary time involves waiting on God, believing that He is, in fact, growing a harvest.