Fifth Sunday in Lent: March 17, 2024
The Rev. Nat Johnson
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33
Psalm 119:9-16
“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains a single seed; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” This is one of Jesus’ shortest parables, offered as a bizarre response to the request of “some Greeks” for an audience with him. Everyone had been in Jerusalem, preparing for the great festival of Passover. Jesus’ fame and reputation had preceded him – some sought him out because they had either witnessed or heard about Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead; some were curious if he would show his face knowing the religious and political authorities were trying to arrest him. In the narrative flow of John’s gospel, the passage we read this morning marks a pivot, a turning point. It marks the end of his public ministry and his shift to preparing his disciples for his imminent departure. It marks the climax of the mixed reception Jesus experienced and the violent rejection that would lead to his arrest, trial, and execution.
At least three times already, Jesus had said that his hour had not yet come. Now, the time had come – “unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains a single seed; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” In this final public teaching, Jesus responds to the searching Greeks using this bizarre parable to offer a glimpse into the death that awaited him. When the writer of our Gospel uses the term “death,” he does so in a way that assumes not just the death of Christ, but his resurrection and ascension. Jesus’ death would not be counted as the loss of a life cut too short. His death would be generative because he would be resurrected and would return to the one he called Father.
Later, when he was sharing his final meal and instructions with his disciples, he would say that his death, resurrection, and ascension would open the door for the Spirit – the Advocate and Comforter – to come and guide them into all truth, empower them to continue in the work of God in the world, and lead them to do greater things than even he had done.
It is a strange paradox that cuts against the grain of our understanding – death precedes life, loving life causes one to lose it and hating one’s life in this world leads to eternal life with God. In the course of the history of the Church, passages like this one have been abused, used to disregard the plight of the poor, the marginalization of the oppressed, and to protect the power of dominance. Those whose skin color, identity, social rank and status fall outside the bounds of the status quo are often painted as the ones who love their life in this world and are doomed to lose it in eternity. But the Church has erred every time it has spouted such an interpretation, perpetuating what Walter Wink calls “the myth of redemptive violence.”
This way of understanding Jesus’ words about his own death and the death to which he calls us is a glorification not of God’s name but of suffering. It posits that suffering is itself salvific. It suggests, especially for the oppressed and the disinherited, that suffering is the path to redemption. In our present moment, this ends up meaning that suffering experienced because of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and misogyny is simply the cross that some of us must bear in quiet submission if we wish to see our souls saved from eternal damnation. Friends, this is not the good news of Jesus Christ. Those who wish to see Jesus will not find him in such interpretations. It is contrary to all that Jesus did and taught and it distorts the kind of life that Jesus offers us and into which Jesus invites us.
The metaphor of a single grain of wheat dying and producing much fruit recalls to mind the many points at which Jesus speaks about abundant harvests, springs of water welling up to eternal life, the bread of life that satisfies overwhelming hunger, and the water of life that quenches even the deepest of thirsts. In him is the true life, a life that is marked by generative abundance. In our current passage, this is contrasted with “life in this world,” a life hell-bent on refusing the kind of life that Jesus gives and grasping instead a life estranged from God and opposed to God’s expansive nature and purposes. “Life in this world” is a life controlled by consumerism, dominance, and violence, where people are segregated into winners and losers. In all of our efforts to maintain this kind of life, Jesus says, we will find that we have actually lost true life – our efforts are futile, ultimately doomed to destruction because it is only in death to life in this world that we find the kind of abundantly generative life that God offers us in Christ.
The good news proclaimed to us this morning is that life in this world is not absolute – it is not the definitive narrative of life’s purpose or quality. The reign of God has indeed come near, and the life we are offered under that reign breaks into our world even now – it is not a reality reserved for the elite in some distant, undefined future. In his Theology of Hope, Jurgen Moltmann reminds us that “In the promises [of God] the hidden future already announces itself and exerts its influence on the present through the hope it awakens.”i The power of true life is accessible now, but it requires our dying to the ways of this world, to the mechanisms of fear, dominance, violence, and control. Jesus promises that death to “life in this world” leads to new life, to nothing less than resurrected life!
Marcus George Halley, in his book that some of us have been reading through this Lenten season, says, “If Christians are to have anything of value to say to world, we must do so rooted firmly in the nurturing soil of resurrection… Christians aren’t simply called make the world a better place. That work might sound good but it is ultimately too small… Jesus did not come to make the world better. He came to make all things new.”ii Friends, this is the good news of our Gospel this morning. Yes, death precedes life, but that death is a rejection of all the death-dealing ways of this world that stifle and attempt to snuff out the true life that is in Jesus and that God offers us through Jesus.
Early in John’s Gospel, Philip seeks out Nathaniel to tell him about Jesus. When Nathaniel questions Philip’s certainty that Jesus is the One they’d been waiting for, Philip invites him to “come and see.” And here, in our present passage, some Greeks who were in Jerusalem for the festival declared that they came to see Jesus. And I wonder if this isn’t the invitation for us this morning – if “hating our life in this world” is really about our continual acceptance of the invitation to “come and see,” to continually accept the gift of resurrection, to lose ourselves not in an act of self-erasure but as an act of reorientation, a turning toward the true life that springs from death transformed.
As we near the end of our Lenten journey, we must be cautious about valorizing suffering and death, looking at the cross alone as our source of salvation. The cross remains simply an instrument of “life in this world” without the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Today, let us remember that the death Jesus speaks about is not the end of life, but the beginning of true life. Amen.
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i Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 18.
ii MarcusGeorgeHalley,Proclaim!SharingWords,LivingExamples,ChangingLives(NewYork:Church Publishing, 2020), 48.