The Harvest

At a glance

The chapter heading text (KJV)

“And Jesus went about all the cities and villages… But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd. Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.”

Matthew 9:35–38 KJV

Summary

Opening Part III, Bonhoeffer reads Jesus' compassion for the ‘scattered, shepherdless’ crowds as the emotional and theological ground for everything the mission discourse will go on to command. Jesus does not view the multitudes with the weary resignation of someone facing an unsolvable problem; he sees a harvest, ready and abundant, which is a strikingly hopeful image to apply to people whom the disciples might reasonably have found exhausting or hostile.

He is careful to note what the disciples are actually told to do at this point — not to strategise, organise, or throw themselves into the work on their own initiative, but simply to pray that the Lord of the harvest will send labourers. Even the mission about to be described in the following chapters is not something disciples take up by their own decision; it must first be asked for and then given, mirroring the passivity-before-Christ's-initiative that has run through the whole book since the call narratives of Part I.

Bonhoeffer draws attention to the disciples' own temptation, visible elsewhere in the Gospels, to protect Jesus from the crowd's demands or to treat his attention as a scarce resource to be rationed — and reads this short scene as a corrective. The messengers who are about to be sent out have first to share Jesus' own compassionate way of seeing the people they will be sent to, rather than experiencing them as an interruption or a burden.

This chapter, brief as it is, therefore does real structural work: it establishes that the mission which follows is rooted not in strategy or urgency alone but in Christ's own compassion, and that even prayer for labourers is itself already an act of dependence on him rather than a plan disciples devise and then ask God to bless.

Key points

• Jesus responds to the exhausted, scattered crowd with compassion and hope, seeing a ready harvest rather than an unsolvable problem.
• The disciples' first instruction is to pray for labourers, not to organise or launch the mission on their own initiative.
• Even mission, like the original call to follow, must be asked for and given rather than simply undertaken by decision.
• Bonhoeffer contrasts this compassionate seeing with the disciples' own occasional temptation elsewhere to treat the crowd as a burden or interruption.
• The mission discourse that follows is rooted in Christ's compassion, not merely in strategic urgency.

Related Scripture

• Mark 6:34
• John 4:35
• Luke 10:2
• Matthew 25:35–40

For reflection and discussion

1. Do you tend to see people around you — especially demanding or difficult ones — more as a ready harvest or as an exhausting burden?
2. Bonhoeffer notes that even the disciples were told first to pray, not to act. Where in your own sense of mission or calling have you skipped past dependence straight to strategy?
3. Is there a group of people in your life right now you find it hard to view with Christ's own compassion rather than weariness?