Festival of Ingathering
Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent
John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/032026.cfm
During Jesus’s time when the temple still existed, there were three annual pilgrimage festivals where Jewish people were to travel to the Temple in Jerusalem if they were in the area and able. These festivals were called the Shalosh Regalim. The first one was Passover (in remembrance of the redemption of the Jewish people from Egyptian captivity and the Barley Harvest), the second one was Shavuot (in remembrance of the revelation of the ten commandments to Moses and the Barley Harvest), and the third one was Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles (in remembrance of the exodus journey through the desert and the fruit harvest). The last one was the event that Jesus attended in today’s gospel.
This festival lasted for 7 days and involves people building huts and staying within them. The holiday has two significant symbolic meanings: Protection and Unity. For Protection, the holiday reflected on and asked God for protection as God did throughout the journey in the desert. There’s a focus on the uncertainty in life and that God must protect us for us to survive. This is also timed with the fruit harvest, because a lot could go wrong and the people desired the protection of their harvest.
For Unity, it gets a little more complex than that. For unity it involves the taking of the Four Kinds, dwelling the sukkah (hut), and joy. The festival overall is joyful focussing on communal happiness that transcends our own selfish wants and desires. It includes being welcoming not just to family and friends, but to all classes, outsiders, strangers, orphans, and woods. It’s focused on uniting all segments of society.
The joining of the four kinds was a symbol of deeper unity. The four kinds are different spiritual classes based on knowledge and good deeds. The four kinds are combinations of these: knowledge but not good deeds, knowledge and good deeds, good deeds and not knowledge, neither knowledge nor good deeds. When these four kinds are bound together they show unity and oneness amongst the diversity of people. It symbolized integration beyond connection where the scholarly are integrated into one group with the ignorant.
The sukkah takes the unity even further by symbolizing that the entire nation of Israel could be within one single sukkah leaning on the protection of God. The sukkah symbolizes the entire person, warts and all. To say the whole nation of Israel is within one sukkah is to say everyone belongs. It symbolically shows that we are all one and unified together as one person.
So, the significance of today’s gospel would have resonated more with people familiar with the Jewish traditions within Jesus’s time. Jesus was being rejected at a unification festival. People wanted to kill Jesus while they were celebrating their unification and that everyone belongs. Jesus was made an outsider. Jesus’s response too would have been taken very harshly as he was saying that they did not know or understand God: the reason they were celebrating the festival, the one for whom they are recognizing protection from. This was not the joyful encounter, the celebration of unity, or the gratitude and prayer for divine protection. Jesus was showing that their connection to God and their fellow people was strictly nominal and not real. The realness behind the tradition, the spirit of it is more important. They could disagree with Jesus, but he was still part of the sukkah and a unified member of the four kinds. Their behavior was of ultimate rejection. This gospel for me celebrates the tradition and the spirit behind. It calls out that that spirit was somehow lost along the way. While what Jesus was offering was new, it was also there all along. God’s revelation was within their tradition, the people just lost sight of the deeper meaning of it.
We continue to experience this tension today. May we learn from this festival and recognize our deeper unity and integration with one another. Everything belongs. Some of the things we may reject, might just be an instrumental part of our salvation and a revelation from God.
Reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukkot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Pilgrimage_Festivals
