I’m familiar with the language of grain prices, yields (how many bushels did an acre produce), the perennial worries about hail and drought.Īnd I certainly know people who have built bigger barns. So recently when the Gospel reading was about the man who was harvesting so much grain that he decided to tear down his barns and build bigger ones, I could identify. Jesus lived in an earthy, messy, tactile world. He knew the familiar smells of manure, and the fishy odor of a catch being unloaded. He saw sheep grazing on hillsides, fishing boats plying the waters, full measures of grain being pressed into laps. Sowing, reaping, noticing weeds along the roadside - this was Jesus’s world.
Jesus lived in a largely agrarian economy.
These roots help me to identify with the farming images of the Gospel. I have roots - literal and figurative - in the land he purchased, a very small acreage that I still own. Generations later, I grew up on that farm. My great-grandfather, a refugee from the devastating famine in Ireland, came to Nebraska to farm.
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