Sometimes our distance from the life and times of the Bible makes it difficult to understand the illustrations that are used in Scripture, but sowing and reaping are images understandable even to people who don’t make their living by farming. Any child who has planted a seed in a paper cup full of dirt, then waited for it to grow, understands that it takes time. You take care of it, giving it sun and water, but the outcome still depends on God, whether you plant one seed in a cup or acres and acres of corn or beans.
Just a little experience with gardening is also enough to understand that you can’t plant carrot seeds and expect cucumbers to grow, or sow beans and reap tomatoes. So it is no surprise to find the same principle in our lives, that we can’t spend our time and resources on satisfying ourselves and expect to reap the fruits of righteousness.
Commentators differ on what Paul had in mind when he wrote “when the perfect comes” (or, depending on your translation, “when completeness comes”). Some consider it to have come already, when the writing of the Bible was completed. Other see it in the future, at the second coming of Christ. The differing views often correspond to one’s belief as to whether the spiritual gifts of tongues and prophesy ended with the apostles or continue today.
Whichever way it is interpreted, Paul clearly wants the Corinthian Christians to aspire more to loving one another than to the often more visible gifts of tongues or prophesy. If what we care about is other people seeing what good Christians we are, rather than on the good we can do for others – whether anyone sees it or not – we haven’t learned the lessons of love Paul is trying to teach us.
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