What does "You Reap What You Sow" Mean?
You reap what you sow is a simpler of way of referring to a quote in the Biblical New Testament, in Paul’s letters to the Galatians. This is often just referred to as Galatians. Galatia was located in what is now Turkey, and Paul’s letters to the Christian communities that lived there remain important in Christian thought and theology. The specific quote in the King James Version of the Bible is “whatsoever a man soweth, that he shall also reap.”
Farming metaphors obviously worked very well in societies much dependent on agriculture and the idea of “you reap what you sow,” is that people can expect to harvest the fruit of their behavior, just as farmers expect to harvest the crops that they plant. Therefore, people who go through life “sowing’” kindness and goodness to others, will often be rewarded for their behavior, if not on earth than in eternal life, and those who sow bitterness may face punishment. Paul’s precedes this metaphor with the statement that “God is not mocked,” and this could mean that even if great behavior and kindness doesn’t bring earthly rewards, it will certain bring heavenly ones, while the person who skates through life without acting in a manner approved by God, is not fooling the Creator.
The idea of behavior having repercussions or consequences is not unique to Christianity. The whole of karma in Hinduism is intrinsically linked to the concept of “you reap what you sow.” Reincarnation gives people an opportunity to continue to improve on their spiritual life, and any action in this life can have repercussions in the next. A related quote occurs in the Kenneth Branagh film Dead Again where a character refers to reincarnation as the karmic credit plan. “Buy now, pay forever.”
From a spiritual context, the idea that you reap what you sow is fairly understandable. When people believe in an afterlife or numerous lives, it will be fairly easy to comprehend that actions have consequences either now or in hereafter. However, there are some people who appear to sow discord, dishonesty or other unenviable things and never pay for it, and when these people lack a concept of the afterlife and don’t suffer immediate consequences for poor behavior, they may not fully accept Paul’s metaphor. Many people wonder how it is that some people get away with troubling or unethical behavior without paying for it. The religious answer is that all things are paid for eventually, but without this belief, there some sometimes seems to be a discrepancy between sowing and reaping.
Some would suggest that ultimately, someone pays a price for bad behavior and benefits from the good, but the individual is not always the payee or the receiver. Determining the precise and long reaching effect of a single action may be difficult to do without a time machine. Scientific theories like chaos theory bear out that even the minutest actions affect the future in diverse ways, sometimes resulting in unexpectedly drastic changes.
In all, the idea "you reap what you sow" can be simplified to suggest that actions will have consequences. They don’t necessarily have immediate consequences: the ones the farmer expects when he plants tomatoes and gets a tomato crop, for instance. It’s an idea that can be taken philosophically, religiously or scientifically, or it may just apply to encouraging good behavior today so that hopefully tomorrow such behavior may influence the person or the world in a positive way.
Written by Tricia Ellis-Christensen
