And he that reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit unto life eternal: that both he that sows and he that reaps may rejoice together.
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Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
And he that reapeth, &c. Christ invites the Apostles to labour with Him in gathering in this harvest, by the hope of an eternal reward. As though He said, "He that reaps wheat receives wages, but only brief and temporal: but he that reaps with Me this spiritual harvest of souls gathers it unto life eternal. For this harvest the reaper gains both for himself and for his crop, that Isaiah , for the souls whom he converts, for he leads them to heaven as it were in triumph." "The fruit of this terrestrial harvest," says S. Chrysostom, "does not arrive at eternal life, but that spiritual harvest always accompanies us." Christ calls Moses and the Prophets sowers, who with great labour delivered the seeds of faith to the Jews, i.e, such first principles as that God is One, and that the Messiah would come for the salvation of the world. The reapers are Christ and His Apostles, who, by the teaching of the Gospel, perfected these first principles of the Prophets, and by the faith and grace of Ch...
It is the time (saith He) of the Word calling to the Faith, and shewing to the hearers the arrival at its consummation of the legal and Prophetic preachings. For the law by typical services, as in shadows did foreshew Him That should come, that is, Christ: the Prophets after it, interpreting the words of the Spirit, Yet a little while, were fore-signifying that He was even now at hand and coming. But since He hath stepped within the doors, the word of the Apostles will not remove to far distant hope that which was expected, but will reveal it already present: and will reap from legal worship those who are yet in bondage to the law and who rest in the letter only, and will transfer them as sheaves into the Evangelic habit and polity; and will likewise cut off from polytheistic straying the worshipper of idols, and will transfer him to the knowledge of Him That is in truth God, and, to speak all in brief and succinctly; will transform them who mind things on the earth unto the life of th...
For the fruit of an earthly harvest profits not to life eternal, but to this which is for a time; but the spiritual fruit to that which has neither age nor death. Do you see that the expressions are of sense, but the thoughts spiritual, and that by the very words themselves He divides things earthly from heavenly? For when in discoursing of water He made this the peculiar property of the heavenly Water, that he who drinks it shall never thirst, so He does here also when He says, that this fruit is gathered unto eternal life.
That both he that sows and he that reaps may rejoice together.
Who is he that sows? Who he that reaps? The Prophets are they that sowed but they reaped not, but the Apostles. Yet not on this account are they deprived of the pleasure and recompense of their labors, but they rejoice and are glad with us, although they reap not with us. For harvest is not such work as sowing. I therefore have kept you for that in which the toil is less and the pleasure greater, and...
