Plough Sunday falls in January, the first Sunday after Epiphany, the day when, whatever ploughs we push from Monday to Saturday, we ask God’s blessing on our work as we take it up in the New Year. In country churches, people would bring their ploughs right into church for a blessing: ‘God speed the plough’, carrying all their hopes for the year’s harvests ahead. Women, of course, will have already been back at work, since their equivalent, Distaff Day (a reference to spinning), always falls on 7 January.
As if in response to this renewed activity, the Church’s calendar hots up. No sooner is Christ born than he is baptised, also on Sunday 10 January – even though in real life, of course, he was baptised as an adult. The Church has only a few short weeks (especially when Easter is early) to bring the story to its conclusion at the cross (although, as we know, that wasn’t the conclusion.)
In case Epiphany is forgotten and the birth that prompted the arrival of the Magi, we should perhaps, take our last look at the crib, bowing out backwards, as it were, with all formality. A choir boy asked me a few years ago if I had actually seen God. Isn’t that what we all want? That’s what took the shepherds to Bethlehem: ‘let us see this thing that is come to pass’, and what brought the Magi through the worst weather for a journey.
Church services at Christmas and Easter are particularly vivid. We are surrounded by religious imagery, and this helps us to contemplate in so many ways. They are just images, and yet they help to bring God very close. It is important, though, that this is not the only way we see God. Christmas scenes and cribs must eventually be packed away. As secular life starts up again, we have to switch our focus to the world around us, a world where it is inconceivable to so many people that there is a God – let alone a God who longs to be loved by them, a God who made himself as vulnerable as a baby.
In her Christmas message a few years ago, the late Queen talked about the real measure of Christ’s influence being the ‘good works quietly done by millions of men and women, day in and day out, throughout the centuries’. Seeing Christ in the actions and behaviour of other people sometimes takes some looking, but what we see can be more authentic than the pictures we invoke in our churches.
Our hope, of course, must be that other people, by some miracle, see Christ when they look at us.
Terence Handley MacMath
Feature Image: “Ploughing”, Wikicommons, PD,