Plough Sunday, 18Th January 2015, Cirencester

Plough Sunday, 18th January 2015, Cirencester.

I have a confession to make. Should you be new to the ceremony of Plough Sunday, then equally so am I.

However I have done some research. Originally observed on the first Monday after Twelfth Day, marking the return to work after the festivities, according to the scholarly Austrian Jesuit Francis Xavier Weiser, the symbolic ‘ploughing’ of the earth to make the soil fertile derived from ancient pagan rites. Writing in the 1950s, he suggested that the original fertility cult is still preserved in the superstition that maidens who draw the plough or sit on it or touch it will soon be married and will be blessed with healthy offspring.¹ Just as well to know.

In Catholic times, says Chambers’s Book of Days, the plough-men kept lights burning before certain images in churches, to obtain a blessing on their work; and they were accustomed to go about in procession, gathering money for the support of these ‘plough-lights’. The Reformation put out the lights, but it could not extinguish the festival. Chambers goes on to say that the processions continued, as did collecting the money, not for candles in church, but rather for blowing at the local hostelry.

Whatever happened in the past, these days the candles are alight and well in Cirencester, and the custom respectably moved to a Sunday. Which brings us to the parable of the Sower.

Jesus spoke in parables, but here he makes an exception to his usual practice: he reveals its meaning. Normally he did not. A parable is a story, and a story has a life of its own. We can carry it home and live with it, and at different times see various meanings as they answer to our lives, just as at times we see different colours refracted by a prism as the light passes through. Listen carefully to what Jesus is saying:

The sower soweth the word. (Mark 4:14)

Notice he does not say ‘words’ in the plural, a multiplicity of words, but one word, the word : first and foremost he speaks of the Word made flesh in himself which he offers to us. Jesus is not a theologian, he is the Son of God, the full human embodiment and articulation of God’s creative love; or put in Dante’s words, the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

For as, in the fullness of time, a seed was sown in the dark incalculable vastness of the universe, and the Word was made flesh: so God has sown that seed in our hearts, that his life may be our life, his body our bread and wine, his wintertime our spring, his inextinguishable light our sunshine, his Good Friday our Easter resurrection.

With this talk of Easter you may think that I am getting ahead of myself, for it is still the season of the Epiphany, the Magi are still wending their way home by another way to avoid the wrath of Herod, and the Holy Family are escaping into Egypt. And so I shall tell you a story of what happened on their way, which brings us full circle to the parable of the Sower and Plough Sunday, and let those who may take it home and live with it.

If you look carefully into the landscape of late medieval depictions of the Flight into Egypt, you may often see a farm worker with a sickle reaping a golden wheat-field. The origin is unknown, but the story was widespread and runs as follows. As the Holy Family are going by a ploughman is sowing corn which immediately germinates, grows and ripens, so that the man starts to reap. The soldiers of Herod arriving in hot pursuit, are told that the fugitives went that way at sowing time, and, assuming that to have been months earlier, turn back, and Mary and Jesus are saved.

The tale of The miraculous harvest of wheat crops up in the centuries-old English ballad, The Carnal and the Crane, as well as in this traditional French folk tale collected by Henri Pourrat in the Le Trésor des Contes, which gives the story a very particular twist suited to our theme, though shocking in part it may be. The story is of course apocryphal, and carries the proviso that Saint Aelred of Rievaulx made, writing to his sister, in relating another legendary episode on the Flight into Egypt : Sister, to stir thee to more tenderness of love, have an opinion that this tale is true, without the rashness of wholly affirming it.

The miraculous harvest of wheat

The good Lady was fleeing, fleeing with Jesus in her arms. But Herod’s captain followed hot on the trail with his cavalry mounted on their galloping great horses, clad in iron. On they came in a cloud of dust and sparks, crushing and sweeping all before them. They had sworn that nothing in the fields, no bush, nest nor tussock, should escape their eyes.

A good ploughman wept with hunger in his poor hovel. Neither he nor his wife and children had eaten bread for seven days.

It was in the heart of the dark season, at its hardest after Christmas, the dead time of the year. After the Kings, the cold clings, or so they say. And, dear Lord, how to stay alive until harvest ?

“Go, go, go,” said a voice, “go to the valley, and sow the corn.” He obeyed, and while sowing the wheat, the holy Virgin came by.

“Good day, good day, fine ploughman; what beautiful corn you are sowing.”

“Good day, good day, good Lady, what a beautiful child you have.”

“Tell me, tell me, kind ploughman, would you care to protect him?”

“Yes, oh yes, good Lady. I will do whatever I can.”

Then the Virgin asked him to dig a deep furrow so as to bury her in the earth, holding the Child in her arms. And he leant on the shaft of the plough and made a furrow so deep that the good Lady was able to lie under the earth, she and the Child on her breast. Over them he threw his cloak.

“Tell me, tell me, good ploughman, are you in need of wheat?”

“Yes, oh yes, good Lady, we have not eaten for seven days.”

“Then go, fetch your sickle, and you shall reap your corn.”

“But how, oh how may that possibly be? It isn’t even all sown.”

“Just go, take up your sickle: the wheat shall be ripe for harvest.”

Meanwhile, from the depth of the furrow, the good Lady sang to the corn whatever she needed to sing:

Rise up wheat and ripen ear,

Harvest a hundredfold to bear.

And the wheat came up out of the earth above the Lady and Child: all at once it was green, tall in stalk, golden in ear, wheat ripe for the sickle.

“Go, go, go to the valley, that the corn shall be reaped!”

The good ploughman obeyed the voice, and as soon as the wheat was harvested, the soldiers rode by.

“Good day, good day, ploughman fine fellow. What splendid corn you are harvesting.”

“And you, captain of king Herod, what a splendid horse you ride.”

“Tell me, tell me, good ploughman, have you not seen the Lady go by? In her arms she bears that Child we have orders to kill.”

“Yes, captain, yes indeed. She came by when I was sowing.”

“Then, company turn back : it was last year she travelled this way. But long live the king, yes, by my soul I’ll catch her! I’ll mutilate her breasts, I’ll cut off her arms! The Child will fall to the ground and no longer be able to suckle.”

They shouted, they swore, they ranted, the captain and Herod’s soldiers. With a great clamour of galloping, iron ringing and hooves pounding, off they went like a whirl of dust on the wind that vanishes over the fields.

The good Lady rose up from the furrow, and the Child blessed the wheat. The corn had sprung up in a single momentfromtheearth,asthoughfromthebreastofthe Child, as though from his own flesh. There was plenty for the good ploughman, and for his wife and little ones.

And from this wheat blessed by Jesus, there is abundance of bread for all, and for the bread of God  Alleluia !

¹ Francis X. Weiser - Christian Feasts and Customs