Woe is me! for I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits, as the grapegleanings of the vintage: [there is] no cluster to eat: my soul desired the firstripe fruit.
Ver. 1. Woe is me, for I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits] Allai li, Alas for me. This last sermon of his the prophet begins with a pathetic queritation, bewailing his own unhappiness in the little good success of his ministry. Mirifice autem nostris temporibus hic sermo convenit, saith Gualther. This discourse suits well with these times; wherein we may justly cry out with the prophet Isaiah, "Who hath believed our report?" And again, "O my leanness, my leanness! woe is me, for there is only as the shaking of an olive tree, and as the gleaning grapes when the vintage is done," Isaiah 24:13; Isaiah 24:16. Hei mihi quam pingui macer est mihi taurus in arvo. Though he had worn himself to a very skeleton in the Lord's work; yet had he laboured in vain, Israel was not gathered, Isaiah 49:4,5, and hence his woeful complaint. The like we read of Elias, 1 Kings 19:10, where he bitterly bewails his aloneness; so did Athanasius in his age; and Basil in his Fasciculus temporum, A. D. 884, cries out, for the paucity of good people, Heu, heu, Domine Deus, Alas, Lord, how few appear to be on thy side.
“ Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto. ”
And Gualther complains, that the Anabaptists in Germany urged this as a chief argument to draw people from communion with our Churches, that there was so little good done by preaching, and so few souls converted. Hence some ministers despond, and are ready to kick up all. Latimer tells of one who gave this answer why he left off preaching, because he saw he did no good. This, saith Latimer, is a naughty, a very naughty answer. A grief it will be, and fit it should be; piety to God and pity to men calls for it. Christ wept over Jerusalem; Paul had great heaviness and continual sorrow in his heart (not inferior to that of a woman in travail ' Oδυνη, Rom 9:2) for his contumacious countrymen; neither could he speak of those lewd lowlies at Philippi with dry eyes, Philippians 3:18. But an utter discouragement it should not be, since our reward is with God however, Isaiah 49:5, and perhaps a larger, because we have wrought with so little encouragement: we have ploughed when others have only trod out the grain: they trod and fed together, when as those that plough have no refreshing till the work be done, Hosea 10:13. Certain it is that God will reward his faithful servants, secundum laborem, non secundum proventum, according to their pains taken in the ministry, and not according to their people's profiting, Kατα κοπον ου κατα καρπον ..
There is no cluster to eat] None to speak of: hedge fruit there is great store; wild grapes not a few; grapes of Sodom, clusters of Gomorrah; but for good grapes, pleasant fruit, godly people, there is a wondrous scarcity of such. Diogenes lighted a candle at noonday to look for a man; the host of Nola went to the graves to call for the good men of the town. Cicero saith, that if there be one good poet in an age it is well. Christ wondered at one good Nathaniel, and tells us in the same chapter, that they are but few that receive him, and with him the adoption of sons, John 1:12. Clusters we must not look for; but if there be found two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outmost fruitful branches, it is well, Isaiah 17:6. Sufficit mihi auditor unus, sufficit nullus. Paul when he came first to Philippi had a poor audience, only a few women, Acts 16:13, and one convert: neither had he much better success at Athens, and no Church could be planted there, Acts 17:33,34 .
My soul desired the firstripe fruits] Praecocem fructum, the early ripening fruit, as a great dainty, a precious rarity. We highly prize nettlebuds when they first bud; so doth God our young services. Jeremiah 1:11, he made choice of the almond tree because it blossometh first; so of Jeremiah from his infancy. He called for firstfruits of trees, and of the earth, in the sheaf, in the threshingfioor, in the dough, in the loaves. He would have ears of corn dried by the fire; and wheat beaten out of the green ears, Leviticus 2:14. He would have the primrose of our childhood. There were three sorts of firstfruits. 1. Of ears of grain offered about the passover. 2. Of the loaves, offered about Pentecost. 3. About the end of the year, in autumn. Now of the two first God had a part, not of the last. He likes not of those arbores autumnales, autumn trees, Judges 1:12 (φθινοπωρινα), that bud at latter end of harvest. Conversion (as divines observe) usually occures between eighteen years of age and twenty-eight: besides Abraham in the Old Testament, and Nicodemus in the New, we have not many instances of men converted in old age. When people grow crooked and rooted in evil practices they are hardly ever set straight again. "Remember therefore thy Creator in the days of thy youth"; his soul delighteth in the first ripe fruits. Remember that Jesus Christ shed his blood for thee when he was but eight days old when he was circumised; and took thee into his family by baptism when thou didst hang on thy mother's breast.