When we are faced with doing something difficult, it can help to remind ourselves what good will come of it. That’s what gets me to exercise and eat healthfully. But that’s a pretty superficial example. How about a parent who works a couple of jobs to ensure college money for her children? That outcome is a long way off, yet worth the sacrifice. Or “altruistic organ donors” like a Connecticut woman who offered a kidney to anyone who was a match, kicking off a round robin of surgeries in which four couples who were not matches for each other donated kidneys to other spouses, resulting in four kidney transplants and eight surgeries in one day.
In this gospel passage, we see Jesus confront his upcoming passion and death, and remind himself why he had so much pain and loss ahead. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
In the natural world, whether in our gardens or our bodies, there is no growth without death. New skin grows as old cells die and are sloughed off. Chicks hatch only if the egg breaks. A baby’s birth wreaks trauma on the mother’s body. Butterflies must demolish their cocoons to get free. And yes, seeds bear fruit only as they are buried in dark earth and broken open so that the new life within can come to fullness.
That is our calling as followers of Christ – to follow him into the dark, allow ourselves to be broken and transformed from a seed into a seedling, and then into a plant that bears abundant fruit. That’s pretty much the trajectory of a disciple. Every ounce of energy we spend clinging to what we have, what we love, what we can see, is energy not spent allowing ourselves to be planted, broken, transformed and flourishing. "Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life."
This is also our calling as the Body of Christ, as congregations: to allow ourselves to be broken open, inconveniently, sometimes painfully; our patterns and presuppositions challenged and changed, so that we can bring life and fruit to hungry people around us. For all the destruction and trauma wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, it did yield that positive effect, to accelerate this breaking open process in many churches. It’s up to us to discern, based on where we are now, how we can do better at bringing life and fruit to hungry people around us.
Where are you discerning a call to be like a seed that is planted, broken, transformed and made fruitful? Where are you on that cycle? It’s one we repeat more than once in our lives… sometimes more than once in a week! It can help to remember that we are following Jesus into that dark earth, that he is with us in the seed process. As he said, “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.”
We not only follow him into the dark earth. We live in the promise that, like him, we have emerged into new Life, that Life which never ends. Do all seeds know the glorious outcome of their process? If we must cling to anything, let it be that promise, this Life we have already begun to live.
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