Winter Winnowing
Live a CHARMED life!
CHARMED*
A
Daily Passage
Reflections
Today’s reading ends on a difficult verse. Verse thirty has probably been misunderstood and misused by many: “Blows that wound cleanse away evil; beatings make clean the innermost parts.” I’ve heard of religious followers who whip themselves as they meditate in an attempt to mortify the flesh and elevate the spirit and am curious if it is a practice inspired by this verse thirty. I think of Reverend Dimsdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. I shudder.
Please, please, please, don’t read every word of the Bible literally. The Hebrews were very poetic in their writings. This wisdom literature is filled with all types of literary devices: repetition, figurative language, allusions . . . In fact, at first reading, there are a lot of seemingly violent images in today’s passage. If I had stopped at my first reading, which was - taking every word literally, I would have walked away confused and feeling empty and a bit disgusted. Verse eight reads: “A king who sits on the throne of judgment winnows all evil with his eyes,” and verse 26 carries that image to a violent end: “A wise king winnows the wicked, and drives the wheel over them.” What!?
Do you know what winnowing is?>It is a key word that takes us deep into this passage today. Winnowing is a practice completed by farmers after the harvest of a grain. I have actually watched this process in Haiti when I lived there in an apartment in the loft of a barn. A beautiful sight. Not violent at all! The grain is dried in the sun and then placed in large shallow baskets and tossed up into the air. What is the good kernel, ripe for eating, falls back down into the basket, but the lightweight parts that are not good to eat, called the chaff, are caught by the breeze and carried away. It is a process of separation. The grain sparkles golden in the sun especially after it is separated from the chaff. The king, acting as judge is described as having the ability to separate the good from the evil with his eyes. After the winnowing, the wheel is driven over them. While my mind sees him throwing them into the streets and driving over them with a car or, to take it to their time, a chariot? — just awful— to a careful listener with the ear tweaked to the context of the culture that produced such a passage, this wheel is again related to the process of harvesting grain. It is the threshing wheel.
I find it odd that this passage seems to place the threshing after the winnowing, but I don’t think we are to read that chronologically. I think we are just to get the extended metaphor. However, this backwards juxtaposition made me curious about the Hebrew culture. I wondered if their winnowing process was the same as what I witnessed in Haiti. So, I did a little reading in my IVP Bible Background Commentary. This is what they have to say about the whole process:
Writers for the IVP suggest: Some of the seeds commonly planted at the time of this passage were caraway and cumin. Because of the fragile nature of these grains, smaller threshing tools were used so as to not damage them. . . “The process of threshing the grain is put of the threshing floor and crushed by the feet of oxen. Then, it is processed by running a sledge over it which is a wooden device with two or more rows of wheels affixed. Once the grain has been separated from the stalks, it had to be winnowed, sieved, and given to women to be crushed on grinding stones to make the flour used for baking” (620).
With this cultural context in mind, now read the last verse: “Blows that wound cleanse away evil; beatings make clean the innermost parts.” Yes! It works. It is not what we are to do literally but a call to read literarily! This is a metaphor my friends! Judging the heart is being compared to all of the stages of the agricultural process of harvesting grain where the good kernels are separated from the chaff.
Many of the verses today do have to do with searching the heart. Verse nine reads:” Who can say, “I have made my heart clean; I am pure from my sin”?” and verse 27 suggests, “The human spirit is the lamp of the Lord, searching every inmost part” (27). The wise king judges here. Kings to the Hebrew, were representative of God, doing the work of God.
In this reading, we are the king. We are a divine representative, who having been gifted with all the wisdom we need to see with our eyes and to hear with our ears and to understand the difference between what is good for us and what is toxic, are to act as judge. Take the lamp of wisdom and shine it within. Thresh, winnow, release, and shine. You are the true kernel. You are the fruit. You are the bread of life. Everything you need that is pure has already been established. It’s the outer shell, hardened by all of the wind and the rain of you life which needs to fall away. So let it fall. Let it fall today. If if you are reading this in the cold of winter, it’s OK — it’s just a metaphor. The Harvest is always now. Release and shine.
harvest
“There, if I grow, The harvest is your own.”
—William Shakespeare
Macbeth 1:4
Eight Affirmations of Gratitude
I am grateful for my harvests.
I am thankful for the wisdom I have as I weigh my own heart.
An give thanks that I can easily release the things in my life that are not beneficial to my well being.
I am thankful for the “winnowing” process in my own life.
I am thankful for my clean, pure, golden heart.
I give thanks for the lamp that searches the soul.
I am thankful for this passage today.
I am grateful for experiences in life that have helped me to connect to this scripture today.
Questions to Consider
What fruits am I harvesting from the way I choose to live my life?
Am I allowing the “chaff” I produce to simply blow away in the wind?
How can I shine a lamp on the inmost regions of my being?
Blessings
Thank you for joining me. May you be planted and grow ripe for harvesting, and may all your chaff float away in the breeze as you glitter golden in the warmth of the sun. Love and light to you my friends. Namaste.
*Note: CHARMED, is an acronym that I have developed, related to abundant living. There are seven letters, one for each day of the week. While I encourage you to touch on all of the letters on a daily basis, one letter will be highlighted each day.
In CHARMED, A stands for aerate. Click on the A in the card posted above and go to a page full of ways to aerate. I encourage you to peruse the page and try one of the proposed practices to get your charm on as quickly as possible.