Boraiya the Farmer

2000–2006, we lived in Ooty, a hill station in India. Our house was in a remote area, and our closest neighbor was a farmer, Boraiya. He and his family grew vegetables like cabbage and carrots. One summer, Boraiya had an unexpectedly poor harvest of carrots. I was sad for him, but he wasn’t as sad as I thought he would be. I asked him what his plans were. He said he would till the ground with the carrots that didn’t grow, their stems and leaves, and mix them with manure so the next harvest would be substantial. Sure enough, the next crop of cabbage was plentiful.

In ancient agricultural societies, burning unharvested plants and mixing them with manure for the next harvest season was normal practice. John alluded to this when he said,

“The winnowing fork in the Spirit’s hands to clean out his threshing floor and to gather the grain into his barn and the chaff to be burned by unquenchable fire.” (Luke 3:17)

His audience would have known they weren’t words of destruction but rather of comfort. For agricultural societies, leaving a land unharvested or untilled and letting thorns and thistles was a sign of neglect. Barren land was a sign of a curse, not a burned land.

Just in case Theophilus, a Roman lawyer, missed this, Luke wanted to make him understand this. He said,

“With many other comforting words, John proclaimed the good news to the people.” (Luke 3:18)

Winnowing fork, chaff, and unquenchable fire were all comforting words for the Hebrews who thought their Lord had abandoned them and left them alone like a barren land that could grow thorns and thistles. Instead, the Lord had sent his farmer – the Mighty One – who would cleanse the land with a fiery Holy Spirit ready to harvest the land again. Those were comforting woods and good news for the Hebrews.

When I first went to the United States, I saw picket signs on people’s yards that said, “Turn or Burn.” They were saying that if someone didn’t repent, they would burn in hell. Besides revealing callous hearts, signs like that show ignorance of ancient agricultural worlds. A better sign would be, “Repent or Will be Cleansed Again.”

John’s message had initial takers – people who submitted themselves to God’s rule and changed their lifestyles. They gave away their second set of outer coats, fed the poor, didn’t tax wrongly, and didn’t exhort money from the poor but were satisfied with their wages (Luke 3:11–14). When they didn’t submit to God’s rule, the Savior and Spirit took over and reworked them into the soil, only to reap a harvest later. They would have been people who accepted God’s rule after John’s death and when Jesus began his ministry, including all of Jesus’s disciples and apostles.

When we share the good news with people, and they don’t accept it, we shouldn’t adopt a “turn or burn” philosophy. Instead, we should take comfort that the Savior and his fiery Spirit would take over their lives and purify them, perhaps even through fiery trials, to make them fruitful harvests later.