Another old essay.

The other day at daily Mass we heard a delightful little reading from the Gospel of Mark, including 4:26-29. Mark is by far the shortest Gospel. Yet there are a few little passages in it that can be found nowhere else, and this is one of them.

And he said, "The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come."

This small parable, which emphasizes the works that God performs in the hidden depths of the soul, is put to justly famous use in the second verse of Henry Alford's majestic hymn, Come Ye Thankful People, Come:

All the world is God’s own field,
fruit unto His praise to yield;
Wheat and tares together sown
unto joy or sorrow grown.
First the blade and then the ear,
then the full corn shall appear;
Lord of harvest, grant that we
wholesome grain and pure may be.

Alford's tremendous achievement--besides the musical (i.e. euphonic) and rhetorical excellence of the hymn--is the culling of many different images related to the harvest and putting them together well. This is difficult to do. Each text must be accurately represented: its meaning must be the same as it was in its original context. Then it must be accurately related to the other texts, whose original contexts were very different. It is in this way especially that Alford's hymn is theologically--hermeneutically--excellent.