Sowing or reaping? There is no third option.

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 17, 2025

Each time we read through the Bible, different passages claim our attention. There are probably a well-coordinated set of reasons for this, beginning with the shortness of the human attention span, and ending with the interior grace of the Holy Spirit as we read. I hope I am not entirely alone in my ability to say prayers or even read Scripture while thinking about something else. But if we keep at it, new insights do come to mind. Thus it was yesterday when I began reading the Book of Amos. Suddenly I saw chapter 3, verse 2, where we find this prophecy from God to Israel: “You only have I known of all the families of earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.”

This ought to disturb those who bear the name “Catholic”: God will punish those who have had special opportunities to know Him but have been stubborn in their refusal to respond. God’s wrath is not reserved especially for those who do not know Him, but for those who had the opportunity to know Him but refused to take Him seriously—or those who did in fact know Him but made no serious personal effort to love Him.

The nature of knowing

Obviously, this prophecy is still not easy to parse in all its fullness, or in all its later Christian implications. By now we are so aware of the psychological obstacles that stand in the way of knowledge and our response to it that it is difficult for us to discern with certainty who actually “knows” what, or even who actually has had a true unimpeded opportunity to “know” God. We are perhaps even excessively aware that there can be hidden blocks to “knowing”, and especially to “knowing the love of God”. After all, this is a question not just of input, over which we have some control, but of interior recognition.

Indeed, we are incapable of truly knowing whether someone who hears is capable of understanding, and whether someone who understands is capable of believing, and even whether someone who believes is capable of responding in the ways we believe we would have responded, or we did respond. The nature of both human knowing and human motivation remains a mystery, and it is especially mysterious when it involves ourselves trying to understand the impediments faced by others.

Take something as simple as the differences among the person who sees and believes, who believes without seeing, who doesn’t believe without seeing, and who has seen but still does not believe. Those in some categories might well be blessed, but even some who have seen but did not believe may not be culpable for their non-belief. After all, we are highly-conditioned beings and also beings with many undesired impediments to recognizing what is real, and therefore what is true.

Indeed, for every culpable refusal to apprehend the truth, there are almost certainly multiple non-culpable refusals. No matter how often we may be forced to shake the dust from our feet, we can never say for certain—and neither could the apostles—that all those who refuse the Gospel are culpable. Well might we ask, for example, whether St. Paul was culpable even for his persecution of the first Christians.

Going too far

And yet there is an opposite danger which I think arises more frequently today than in prior centuries—today in our excessively “psychological” age, an age which provides a simple excuse for every failure in perception and commitment (apart, of course, from whatever the dominant culture holds to be “obvious”). In contrast, we remain obliged as Christians to take both grace and resistance to grace seriously. While it remains a mystery why one reaps and another sows (I’d rather be reaping, personally), that mystery is bound up in another—the mystery of why some refuse to listen, some listen but do not hear, and others really do hear, yet they do not yet believe.

The tension here is between unbelief and culpability for unbelief. Or sometimes it is the difference between a living faith and a dead faith, or between coasting along with a general acceptance of Christ without translating this into a deliberately active and deepening commitment. My point is that just as we cannot assume culpability in those who fail to respond as they should to the Gospel, neither can we assume a lack of culpability. There is always a good reason for condemning the sin but not the sinner, and the reason is that we cannot read hearts. Moreover, even if we could, we would in any case mostly recognize how much damage needed to be undone by Our Lord Himself before each heart could be opened to the Gospel.

This is why we judge not lest we be judged (Mt 7:1). But at the same time it is very good that we keep trying to live transparently Christian lives while continuing to invite others into this astonishing universe of faith, hope and love. And this brings us to a second mystery, for the following saying holds true:

Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see how the fields are already white for harvest. He who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor; others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

The plain fact is that we do not know whether we have been chosen to sow or to reap. We know only that we have been anointed priests prophets and kings. As priests, we offer a blessing; as prophets, a message; and as kings a rightly ordered way of life. For it is not our business to envy or even to know the success that others may have in these sacred tasks. But it is our business as Catholics—our business as the People of God, not someone else’s business—to take God’s warning to Israel seriously: “You only have I known of all the families of earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.”

Complacency is untenable spiritually; it will not be excused at the Judgement. If we cannot reap, it is our business to sow. If we cannot sow, it is our business to reap. And through both failure and success, regardless of our opportunities or our level of success, in all seasons it remains our business to pray for the harvest to the harvest’s Lord. Indeed, here the saying holds true once again: One sows and another reaps. For every one of us, but for each in his own way, there is no third option.