and the harvest ripening, for he sees the one fact in the other, and awaits along with the earthly harvest the heavenly, the revelation of the Kingdom of God.
If we look into the thought more closely we see that the coming of the Kingdom of God is not only symbolically or analogically/but also really and temporally connected with the harvest. The harvest ripening upon earth is the last! With it comes also the Kingdom of God which brings in the new age. When the reapers are sent into the fields, the Lord in Heaven will cause His harvest to be reaped by the holy angels.
If the three parables of Mark iv. contain the mystery of the Kingdom of God, and are therefore capable of being summed up in a single formula this can be nothing else than the joyful exhortation: "Ye who have eyes to see, read, in the harvest which is ripening upon earth, what is being prepared in heaven!" The eager eschatological hope was to regard the natural process as the last of its kind, and to see in it a special significance in view of the event of which it was to give the signal.
The analogical and temporal parallelism becomes complete if we assume that the movement initiated by the Baptist began in the spring, and notice that Jesus, according to Matt. ix. 37 and 38, before sending out the disciples to make a speedy proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom of God, uttered the remarkable saying about the rich harvest. It seems like a final expression of the thought contained in the parables about the seed and its promise, and finds its most natural explanation in the supposition that the harvest was actually at hand.
Whatever may be thought of this attempt to divine historically the secret of the Kingdom of God, there is one thing that cannot be got away from, viz. that the initial fact to which Jesus points, under the figure of the sowing, is somehow or other connected with the eschatological preaching of repentance, which had been begun by the Baptist.
That may be the more confidently asserted because Jesus in another mysterious saying describes the days of the Baptist as a time which makes preparation for the coming of the Kingdom of God. "From the days of John the Baptist," He says in Matt. xi. 12, "even until now, the Kingdom of Heaven is subjected to violence, and the violent wrest it to themselves." The saying has nothing to do with the entering of individuals into the Kingdom; it simply asserts, that since the coming of the Baptist a certain number of persons are engaged in forcing on and compelling the coming of the Kingdom. Jesus' expectation of the Kingdom is an expectation based upon a fact which exercises an active influence upon the Kingdom of God. It was not He, and not the Baptist who "were working at the coming of the Kingdom"; it is the host
