Vigils Reading – 33rd Sunday ORD

THE REAPERS OF THE HARVEST

From a commentary by St Gregory Palamas1

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All those who hold to the true faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and show

proof of their faith by good works, guarding themselves from sins or cleansing

themselves from their stains by confession and repentance; who practice the

virtues opposed to those sins – temperance, chastity, love, almsgiving, justice

and fair dealing – all these, I say, will rise again to hear the king of heaven

himself saying to them: Come, my Father’s blessed ones, inherit the kingdom

prepared for you since the creation of the world. So they will reign with Christ,

receiving as their inheritance that heavenly kingdom which cannot be shaken,

living forever in the ineffable light that knows no evening and is interrupted by

no night, having fellowship with all the saints who have lived from the

beginning of time, and enjoying delights beyond description in Abraham’s

embrace, where all pain has fled away and all grief and groaning.

For just as there is a harvest for inanimate sheaves of wheat, so for the

rational wheat which is the human race, there is a harvest that cuts people away

from unbelief, and gathers into faith those who accept the proclamation of the

good news. The reapers of this harvest are the Lord’s apostles and their

successors, and in the course of time the teachers of the Church. Of them the

Lord said: The reaper receives his wages, and gathers a crop for eternal life,

for teachers who instruct others in piety will in their turn receive from God such

recompense as befits those who gather the obedient into eternal life.

But there is yet another harvest: the transfer of each one of us by death

from the present life into that which is to come. The reapers of this harvest are

not the apostles but the angels, who have a greater responsibility than the

apostles, because after the harvesting they sort out the good and separate them

from the wicked like wheat from darnel. The good they send on to the kingdom

of heaven, but the wicked they throw into hell fire.

As for us, who in this present age are God’s chosen people, a priestly race,

the Church of the living God separated from all the impious and ungodly, may

we be found separated from the darnel in the age to come as well, and united to

those who are saved in Christ our Lord, who is blessed for ever.