Text: John 4:27-38 (NKJV)
27 And at this point His disciples came, and they marveled that He talked with a woman; yet no one said, “What do You seek?” or, “Why are You talking with her?” 28 The woman then left her waterpot, went her way into the city, and said to the men, 29 “Come, see a Man who told me all things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” 30 Then they went out of the city and came to Him.
31 In the meantime His disciples urged Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” 32 But He said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” 33 Therefore the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought Him anything to eat?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work. 35 Do you not say, ‘There are still four months and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest! 36 And he who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. 37 For in this the saying is true: ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored, and you have entered into their labors.”
Devotional Thoughts and Commentary:
Chronologically inserted, this interlude between the interaction of Jesus and the Samaritans serves as an important lesson for His band of followers then and us today. Tomorrow, we will pick up the Samaritans in a dense couple of verses.
Again, we see the tense relationship between the Jews and Samaritans as His disciples are taken aback by His interaction with this woman. Concluding this initial dialogue, she ran back to her town, still unsure if He really was the Christ, and called the people out to meet Him.
His disciples are initially concerned with His human welfare. Everyone needs to eat and they had been traveling, so the disciples urged Him to eat. Having already established that Jesus was/is God, John used the hunger of this passage to reaffirm that was a human (in addition to His previous thirst and fatigue). As with the Samaritan woman, He took this mundane human task and made it into a spiritual lesson. Still not really "getting it," the disciples wonder who brought Him this food secretly.
Jesus took the opportunity to teach the vital lesson- He was here to accomplish God's will. As water pictured the giving of spiritual life, now food shows that which sustains us spiritually. Expanding on this and applying it beyond Himself onto His followers, Jesus calls the disciples to look at the fields ready to harvest. This was metaphorical promotion of a spiritual concept- the incoming Samaritans (verse 30) were the field ready to harvest. Jesus, having sowed the seed of truth about Himself, points out that the disciples should be ready to explain this to the people of Sychar and plead with them to follow Him. The people, evidenced by their description as being ripe, were ready to accept Him. This certainly must have felt somewhat odd to the Jewish disciples who had been raised to look down on the Samaritans as spiritual inferiors but now were sharing spiritual equality in following Jesus. We have to remember that everything Jesus said and everything recorded in Scripture was done purposefully. The fact that He had to point out to the disciples that these Samaritans needed the message reflects the fact that they didn't get it. They didn't see the Samaritans as a mission field. To them, they were just dirty, lowly Samaritans. Jesus was teaching the disciples to look at people with spiritual lenses on our glasses, seeing past the physical and looking solely at spiritual needs.
One might wonder about the phrase "white unto harvest" and that does seem a little hard to picture what exactly was going on. "Ok, so what's up with white fields? What is He talking about or what is the significance?" Well, the disciples would have looked over at the agricultural fields nearby Sychar and been confused- the fields were still 4 months from being white from the ripe grain on the top of the stalks. This was likely a secular proverb of the region showing the time between planting and harvest. The fields were likely barren or had little green nubs pointing up. He is sounding a little crazy to His disciples for the moment, but Jesus was really teaching them to stop looking at the things of this world as discussed in the paragraph above. As He often did, He turned something on its head to make people think. "What is He talking about?" He also now has the disciples looking for a large white area to indicate readiness for harvest, and out comes this large group of Samaritans likely dressed in traditional white (in addition to being tradition, it makes the most sense in the context). The Samaritans there were ripe for the spiritual harvest, as the disciples would have likely now realized. I envision this situation playing out where Jesus is talking to His disciples for a couple of minutes as the woman rushed back into the village (distance likely hundreds of yards at most), them being confused as He starts verse 35 and looking for white fields, the Samaritans wearing white coming into sight out of the village as verse 38 finishes, and the disciples having the light go on- "Ohhhhhh, He was talking about the Samaritans."
The application from this passage should not be too generalized here, as the field visible to the disciples (Sychar) is that which was ripe and ready to harvest. There are many future "fields" that would not be ripe to harvest (e.g. Matthew 10:14). Ripeness is dependent on the sowing of good seed (rightly sharing the Biblical truth of the good news of Jesus) and good soil (people willing to accept the good news of Jesus). Not all fields we approach are ready to harvest. Based on this passage in the context of the New Testament (Matthew 10:13-14 and Acts, for examples), we should seek fields with good soil and focus our evangelistic efforts there.
Applications:
Share the good news of Jesus! Assuming that you have accepted Him through belief / faith, it is now a primary responsibility of yours to share that with others. Share the good news and seek people ready to respond to it.
Thank those (directly and to God) who have already shared the good news of Jesus in your community. You are a blip on the spiritual time line of that community, and, in America, there are those who have gone before you. They have planted seeds on which you are able to work.
Other Studies from John
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