Thanksgiving for the harvest

Today’s celebration is an opportunity for us to thank us for the gifts of nature. It leads us to reflect on our relationship with the nature that surrounds us. Compared to the people living in the city, we are lucky to be physically closer to nature. We can immediately perceive the cycle of alternation of individual seasons. It is connected with the work process that we perform in respective seasons in our gardens and in the fields. From spring to autumn, we are united with the life that determined the lives of tens of generations of our ancestors. And yet we modern people are already looking at this from a distance. Most of you work in the city; other rhythms determine our lives. For many years now, many have not counted from spring to autumn – to the feast of all saints, as farmers once did, but rather from one summer, from one holiday to another. For many, the year overlaps with the school year, in which we are still at the beginning of a new cycle. Nevertheless, today we want to thank you for the gifts of nature, for the harvest of the past year, and learn to understand these gifts spiritually.

The fifth book of Moses-Deuteronomy, from which we have read today, is a rational look beyond the beginning of the chosen nation’s history. It is an effort to understand the meaning of individual events in this history. The Israelites pondered the point of strenuously seeking the one God who spoke to them by his covenant, a law that had to be diligently observed. God did deliver them from slavery in Egypt. But the path to freedom led from modesty pots in Egypt to modesty, even to a lack of desert. And yet even in the desert, they did not lack what they needed for their immediate survival. Even in the wilderness, God took care of them, not letting them perish by hunger or thirst. Wandering with God eventually led them to a land that God had once promised their ancestors for inheritance. Although it was fertile and beautiful land, God led them not to seek their final home here either. That well-being and comfort are not the objectives either. Instead, the country will not play a decisive role in the life of the chosen nation. Their values ​​will be rooted even deeper; they will not be bound by place. God wants to lead them even further. To get there, they must not become stuck in material satisfaction or external prosperity.

Awareness of modesty and gratitude for the gifts we receive should also lead to a certain distance from the material one. The donations we receive are not, according to the biblical understanding, merely due to our diligence. Even if we do everything we have to do and have to be diligent in it – we should know that we are useless servants. This is what Christ said a few centuries later. And we took those words too.
Along with the Gospel lesson that we should protect ourselves from covetousness because our life on a deeper level does not depend on what we have. Instead, we should strive to be rich on another level, on the spirit level. We are already different from the Old Testament Israelites and the contemporaries of Jesus in that we no longer approach such a perception of the world around us – as a world given by God – as immediately as they do. They perceived God behind all phenomena in nature. We already have an intellectual explanation for many in the heart. We also judge other realities of life through the ability of our thinking; we are more aware of our responsibility for the world around us. And yet the distance from the material world, as well as the gratitude for the gifts we receive, are still needed today. But we will no longer reach them immediately as humans once did but through a specific reason. She should lead us to a spiritual attitude towards nature, towards the world around us, to respect for life, as the great physician of the poor, humanist, and thinker Albert Schweitzer once put it nicely.

You might say it’s nice, but sometimes we’re too worried about living. Yes, it really is also about how much one has some freedom from the material in the sense of sufficiency. A person can develop his abilities when he has a certain material sufficiency or well-being. Although it is all a relative category, and sometimes it depends on our ability to be modest. However, much is conditioned by the way we live, and there are differences. Therefore, the Bible’s words of gratitude for independence from the material are probably heard differently based on different life circumstances. But Christianity does not want to stand in front of this obstacle. It wants to be an offer for everyone, even for the needy, who will look in him above all for what will help him protect him from his need. It also wants to be an offer for one who is already independent, to be careful before the temptation to rely only on oneself, or the temptation to overlook others’ community. So let us thank you today for the gifts we receive in life and try to use them for good, as well as for also to the growth of life around us,  also to solidarity with others.