John 4:37

SOWING AND REAPING

‘And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth.’

John 4:37

‘That saying,’—it was then a common and familiar saying already; what we should call a proverb of the people. And there can be little doubt that it had, as so used in the common speech of men, a somewhat different meaning from that which our Lord gave to it.

I. The disciples must have recollected those words when, not very long afterwards, He said to them, as He sent them out to the whole house of Israel, as He prepared them for their wider work in the whole world, ‘The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few.’ Well, he seems to say, Learn this lesson now, and carry it through all your future labours: one soweth—I have been sowing—I, within this short hour since you left me, and the fields are white already to harvest; and what you see here is true in the world around you. There God has been doing His work, though you knew it not; not the prophets and psalmists and kings of Israel only, but the wise men, the seekers after truth and after God among the heathen; there also they have poets of their own who have borne witness that God is not far from every one of us, for we also are His offspring.

II. The angels reap the harvest, but Who was the sower?—The sower was He who came to live not to Himself, but for men. Who sowed, just as a corn of wheat falls into the earth and dies to bring forth much fruit, so He gave His own life to death, consented to lay aside the glory that He had with the Father before the world was, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross: and through His whole life on earth, and through that passion, death, and resurrection of His, was sowing the word of eternal life in the hearts of men. The angels in that case reap the harvest which they had never sown. ‘Herein is this saying true, One soweth, another reapeth.’

III. And very often this text is a word of great comfort to the hearts of those who are seeking to serve Christ, every man in his vocation and ministry, devout laymen, as well as earnest priests, in the midst of apparent failure, seeming disappointment. For the growth is not always sudden and instantaneous; and if it is, it is not lasting. The growth of the true seed is that the days pass on and the sun shines and the rain falls, and you see first the blade showing itself above the clods of the earth; then the ear, and after that, the full corn in the ear. And a man may be a very faithful and earnest witness for the truth, may preach, according to the grace given to him, that message of the word of life which is as the good seed of God; and yet never know that it has taken root, never see the harvest which he leaves for other hands to reap.

—Dean Plumptre.