In verse 35, He carries it a little farther. This is part of what was energizing Him:
I mentioned to you last time that He was actually quoting a proverb. He says, Don't you have a saying, 'There are four months until harvest'? What the saying applied to was that there was generally four months between the sowing of the seed and the reaping of the harvest. So over a 120-day period - for four months - a person could say, This is going to come to fruition, and we will have something to show for our work. Here, He was saying, Look, here is the time when we sowed the seed, and we are already beginning to get a harvest. He was viewing the people coming out of the town. These were the fruits of the teaching that He had made to the woman. She got up, left her waterpot, went into town, preached about Him - I do not know whether you could call it preaching in the classical sense, but she went around town and noised it about that there was an unusual personality out there, and she managed to convince an awful lot of people.
Someone - I cannot remember who it was right now - came up with a thought after the Bible study last week that I think is good to interject here: everybody in town knew that she was an immoral woman. Her reputation was not good. Yet when she came back from the well, apparently she was so changed in her attitude - her attitude before might have been really cool. She was worldly. She was sophisticated. She was not somebody who could get excited about things because she had been there and back again. You were not going to get her excited.
But when she went into town, they could see there was something about her worth noticing, and worth following her out of town about. So she went in and did her thing.
Let us make another application here. Remember I told you last week that in one sense I feel that this woman represents the whole world. The representation is, I think, more specific than that. That is, she could represent the church. The church is shown in Scripture as a woman, and when we come out of the world we are immoral in the sense that we have committed many sins, and all of us have been committing spiritual fornication with the world. Then we have a confrontation with Christ. Remember He initiated the conversation - the communication - between the two of them. He led her in such a way until finally, in a burst within her own mind, she had what we would call a spiritual experience.
She began to see herself in relation to God - I perceive that you are a prophet - because He suddenly revealed to her that He knew a great deal more about her than she ever thought. She saw her evilness, and she began to repent. What is the responsibility of the church? The responsibility of the church is to go out, then - away from - and preach the word and bring people to Christ. See the analogy?
There are all kinds of comparisons that can be made here. I do not think that there is one that is exactly the right one. But that is a lesson - a parallel - that can be drawn from that. That is what the church is supposed to do. It is supposed to go out to the world with the message of Christ, which is the gospel of the Kingdom of God, and lead people, as it were, to Christ.
Christ is seeing the fruits of this labor, and He comes up with something else. That is, there are going to be times when we will be enjoying the benefits of other people's labors. We will reap a harvest that we did not sow - we did not cast the seed. All of us are in the church as a result of the labors of those who went before us. We begin to reap, then, the work of those who are before us, and then, you see, we begin to sow, along with the rest of the body, and then others begin to reap what we have sown. There is always going to be that play going on.
He points out that there were going to be times when we would sow and others would reap. Indeed, that occurred to them. The first experience was that on the day of Pentecost, they reaped what Christ had … . . .
That is good to see that. He was human. That is the way you and I are. You know very well that sometimes when you have a task before you that you do not want to do, and you kind of go grumping around, doing everything you possibly can to avoid the thing. You walk around the job about six times, and finally you decide, Well, I gotta do it. It's not going to get done. If it's not done, the boss is going to get on my case. I don't want him on my case, so I better do the job. So we jump into it, and the feeling comes right back, and the first thing you know, you are totally absorbed in what you are doing, and you begin to enjoy what you are doing. Maybe that does not happen to you, but it happens to me.
That is what happened here. He was suddenly all energized here. He was ready to get going. It led into something else:
That is a little bit unwieldy. What He was doing was He was quoting a proverb - not one of the proverbs out of the book of Proverbs, but just a local saying. What He was saying was, Don't you have a saying, 'There are still four months till the harvest'? What it meant was, there are four months between the planting of the seed and the reaping of the harvest. He had just planted the seed in this woman's mind. He was excited by that. When you look at this whole chapter, beginning with the first verse, He was in a hurry to get away from Judea because things were beginning to take shape there that He did not like. His intention was to go to Galilee, so it says that He needed to go through Samaria. He did not intend to stop there. He did not intend to preach to that woman. He did not intend to get involved. He was going to go right through there, go to Galilee, and begin His ministry up there. But instead, God took Him on this digression. Now He was all energized.
That tells you something about Him. He did not know everything that was going to happen. He had to be led by God's Spirit. He had to figure things out logically, using the Bible as the guide. Later on we find - in Matthew 10 - where He says, I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But by this time He had already been to Samaria, and in the meantime He had concluded that it was not His responsibility to go to the Gentiles.
This digression was something that was led of God. There is no indication that anybody was ever converted out of it - at least during the ministry of Christ - yet still Christ saw that the seed was planted.
I want to ask you something. In Acts 8, to where did the apostles first go to begin to preach the gospel in the area of the Gentiles? To Samaria, where Jesus had already gone. You can look back on this now and see that Jesus perceived that the seed was already planted. He said,
The harvest did not come until years later. But Jesus had vision. He knew that there was going to be conversions out of this, even though He may not actually live to see it. You see, there is an approach here for you and me to understand.
