When a large crowd was gathering, as people were coming to him from town after town, [Jesus] said in a parable: “A sower went out to sow his seed, and as he sowed some fell on a path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on rock, and as it grew up it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew it produced a hundredfold.” (Luke 8:4-8, NRSVue)
Our survey of birds in the Bible takes us this week from cozy nesting birds to more harrowing examples of birds as predators and seed-stealers. Echoing the words of the Hebrew prophets, Jesus summoned up carrion-feeding birds as omens of doom for his faithless homeland saying: "Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather (Matthew 24:28)." There were no vultures to be found in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection but illustrations in plenty of Christ's Parable of the Sower, where foraging birds are listed among the perils endangering the good seed of the coming Kingdom of God, which he sought to plant in human hearts. Hari Mitrushi, an Albanian refugee artist now living in Greece, offers us an expressionistic image of what this life and death struggle for precious seed can mean in reality for hardscrabble farmers and waiting birds in his mixed media painting of The Planters, set in a far different land than biblical Palestine. He reminds us how Christ's words have a special resonance for our time, when millions who flee war, political repression, and poverty in search of a better life must scatter the seeds of future hopes and dreams in foreign fields with all the attendant risks of a bitter harvest. (John Kohan)