John 4:37-38

“ For herein is the saying true: The sower is one and the reaper another. 38. I sent you to reap that whereon ye have not labored; other men labored, and ye are entered into their labor. ”

According to Tholuck, Jesus is grieved at the thought that He is not Himself to be present at the conversion of the Gentiles, after having prepared the way for it, and to this point it is that the proverb refers. Astie appears to be of the same opinion. Westcott thinks that Jesus prepares the apostles for the future disappointments in the apostleship. They would then be the sowers who do not reap, while the whole context proves that only Jesus can be so. Weiss: In this region of the spiritual harvest it is not as in ordinary harvests, where the sower is often the same as the reaper. But then the origin of the common maxim which Jesus quotes is not explained, for it expresses just the contrary of what would most frequently be the case in life.

Then, this sense of ἐν τούτῳ, “in the spiritual domain,” is hardly natural. This form of expression has rather a logical sense: “ In this,” that is, “in that you reap to-day what has been sown in your absence and without your knowledge” (John 4:36): thus is the common saying verified. For if this proverb is false in the sense which is ordinarily assigned to it, namely, that he who does the main part of the labor is rarely the one who gathers the fruit of it (an accusation against Providence), it is nevertheless true in this respect, that there is a distinction of persons between him who has the charge of sowing and him who has the mission of reaping. This distinction was at the foundation (for) of the saying in John 4:36, since the community of joy declared in that verse rests upon the duality of persons and offices affirmed by the proverb John 4:37: “ one...another....” ᾿Αληθινός, not in the sense of ἀληθής, veritable, which says truth, but in the ordinary Johannean sense: which answers to the idea of the thing; thus: The or (without the ὁ) a saying which is the true maxim to be pronounced. This distinction, of which they have this day the evidence, between him who sows and him who reaps on this it is that the whole activity to which Jesus has called them will rest: such is the idea of John 4:38.

Ver. 38. As preachers, the apostles will do nothing but reap that which has been painfully sown by others. These last are, undoubtedly, John the Baptist and Jesus Himself, those two servants who, after having painfully ploughed the furrow, have watered with their blood the seed which they had deposited in it. Only there is ordinarily a misapprehension of the allusion which Jesus makes to the particular fact which has given occasion to these words, and which is, as it were, an illustration of them. “That will happen in all your career which is occurring to-day.” I have sent you to reap: Jesus had done this by calling them to the apostleship (John 6:70; Luke 6:13). That on which you have not labored: This harvest in Samaria they have not prepared it, any more than they have prepared that which they will reap afterwards in preaching the Gospel. Others have labored: in the present case, Jesus and the Samaritan woman the one by His word, the other by her eager hastening. What an enigma for the disciples this population hastening to Jesus to surrender themselves to His divine influence, and, what is more, Samaritans! What has taken place in their absence?

Who has prepared such a result? Who has sown this sterile ground? Jesus seems to rejoice in their surprise. And it is, no doubt, with a friendly smile that He throws out to them these mysterious words: Others labored. They may see here an example of what they will afterwards experience: In all their ministry nothing different will occur. Commentators discuss the question whether, by this word others, Jesus designates Himself alone (Lucke, Tholuck, de Wette, Meyer and Weiss), taking others as the plural of category; or Himself and the prophets, including John the Baptist (Keil); or all these personages except Jesus (Olshausen). Westcott applies this word others to all the servants of God in the Old Testament (perhaps with an allusion to Jos 24:13).

The disciples have entered into the work of their predecessors through their fruitful ministry in Judea (John 4:2). But to what end say all this precisely in Samaria? The two most curious explanations are certainly those of Baur and Hilgenfeld. According to the first, by the term others, Jesus designates the evangelist Philip (Acts 8), and by the reapers, the apostles, Peter and John, in the story in Acts 8:15. To the view of the second, the term others designates St. Paul; and the reapers are the Twelve, who seek to appropriate to themselves the fruit of his labor among the Gentiles. On these conditions, one might wager that he could find anything in any text whatever. These forced meanings and the grave critical consequences which are drawn from them, arise in large measure from the fact that the wonderful appropriateness of these words of Jesus, as He applied them to the given situation, has not been apprehended.

Jesus is thinking undoubtedly on His own work and that of John, and the perfect: you are entered, is indeed that which is ordinarily understood by it, a prophetic anticipation; but this form can be well explained only by means of a present fact which suggests it. We discover here, with Gess, the contrast between the manner in which Jesus regarded His work and the idea which the forerunner had formed of it beforehand. “For the latter the time of the Messiah was the harvest; Jesus, on the contrary, here regards the days of His flesh as a mere time of sowing.” We can understand how it must have been more and more difficult for John to bring his thought into accord with the work of Jesus.

The heavenly joy which fills the Lord's heart throughout this section has its counterpart only in the passage, Luke 10:17-24. Here it even assumes a character of gaiety. Is it John's fault, if Renan finds in the Jesus of the fourth Gospel only a heavy metaphysician?