Living Water and the Harvest: A Sermon for Pentecost

In this Pentecost sermon, Daniel McInnes traces the Jewish roots of the feast back to the Torah's harvest festival, and shows its Christian fulfilment in the descent of the Holy Spirit. Drawing on Christ's words about living water in John's Gospel, he calls the Church to be filled with the Spirit and go out into the world to bring in the harvest of souls.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we celebrate the holy Feast of Pentecost. We have now completed 50 days after Pascha. In this Paschal period, we have had Christ resurrected, we have seen his glory, and we have had all of that light shining on us throughout this whole 50-day period. Now we are at the end of that period, moving into the normal flow of the year.

The history of the Feast of Pentecost in its original form comes right from the Torah. It is the festival of the Feast of Weeks — the first-fruits festival for the spring grain harvest, the first major harvest season. In the northern hemisphere, it is a great celebration of the bounty that God has given to his people. They offered that back by taking the first fruits of that crop to the temple in Jerusalem.

And we see the Christian fulfilment of this. When we talk about fulfilment in the Church, we mean the overflowing — the fullness, the filling up and overflowing of the original type. That feast of first fruits is now fulfilled before our eyes in the Epistle reading: the apostles are filled with the Holy Spirit, and immediately thousands of people hear the gospel of Christ being spoken in their own tongue and come into the Church. This is a perfect picture of what that great celebration of the first fruits means — which is why the holy fathers have placed these readings together on Pentecost.

The descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Church is for our sanctification, for the building up of the Church, for our growing in holiness in Christ. But it is also for us to move out into the world and to bring in the harvest. As Christ says, "The fields are white and ready for harvest" — and the Holy Spirit makes us able to go out and gather it.

Another theme I wanted to draw out comes from the Gospel itself. Jesus says, "Come to me, all you who are thirsty, and I will give you living water." This image of living water, if we are reading the Gospel of St. John carefully, should bring up other images for us. In chapter 4, Jesus is sitting at Jacob's Well in Samaria when the Samaritan woman comes to draw water. He says, "Give me some water," and through their conversation he says, "I will give you living water." Through that whole episode with the Samaritan woman, what Christ is doing is showing that this living water will bring salvation, will bring life. And not only that woman, but the whole town she came from became followers of Christ.

We see again in today's Gospel that this living water is the Holy Spirit, going out into the world to bring in those who are ripe and ready for the harvest.

I will not speak for long today, as we have much more of this service to come. But we should always remember: Christ has come to destroy death and defeat the powers of darkness that once reigned over this world — and which reign no more. Christ rules in the midst of his enemies. We are victorious.

Our part in all of this is to be filled with the Holy Spirit, to grow in the Holy Spirit, and to move out into the world to bring in the harvest of souls. May the Lord grant us the capacity to do that as we move into what Fr. Alexander Schmemann calls the normal time of the year — a time of temptation and daily struggle. But in the midst of that, Christ's victory is being won soul by soul, as we move into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit, bringing people in.

Amen.