March 17, 2024 | Rev. Loren McGrail
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus” the Greeks said. They had come to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. What did they wish to see? Jesus the healer? Jesus the teacher? The troublemaker? The peacemaker? Was it his presence?
Dear Ones, did you know that this tiny verse is often carved into pulpits? It’s a reminder that the preacher’s main duty is to help you see, feel, touch Jesus. I am going to assume that some of you come each Sunday hoping to get a glimpse too. Which Jesus do you wish to see? Hint don’t look up. Look down.
Jesus’ earthly time is up. It is now time for the Son of Man to be glorified. To help us understand he gives an example, “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:4).
For the seed to do what it is meant to do it has to fall into the earth and be buried. It has to sit there in the dark until its hour comes, then it will swell, crack, and hatch new life---a green shoot will then climb toward the sun until it breaks through, becoming a stalk of wheat which will bear much fruit. If you dig around in its roots looking for the seed, you won’t find it anymore. It is dead and gone. It gave up its life so there could be more wheat in the world.
Dear Ones, this is a very different understanding of Jesus’ death than the one most of us were taught, is it not? The one that says that Jesus died to atone for our sins. According to John, Jesus died to fill the world with wheat so no one would ever be hungry again. For this to happen, the seed had to be planted. It had to die, or it would never grow. Because Jesus was willing to die, people could discover that death was not the worst thing that could happen to them.
When Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies” he was mixing a metaphor. Seeds doesn’t actually die. But maybe you and I need a type of death to break us apart. Unless something dies, the decay and renewal process cannot continue. In the natural world, decay always leads to renewal of some kind.
Beginning to live as seed means holding our current life structure lightly. This worldly life might just be our seed form so look for the right place to plant yourself. Maybe you’re already in it, or perhaps something needs to change. Realize that while it may feel safe remaining a seed, a seed is not all we are meant to be. Learning to live with both impermanence and potential is what being a seed involves.
Theologian Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor says, “Because Jesus was willing to die, a new community could form in his name, one that redefined its life on the basis of his death. “One of the main points in that redefinition was a new view of suffering. It was no longer something to be avoided at all costs, nor did it mean that God was mad at you. It might in fact mean that God loved you very much, because when someone on a path toward God deliberately chooses the self-offering that goes with that path, then suffering becomes one of God’s most powerful tools for transformation. It is how God breaks open hard hearts so that they may be made new. It is how God cracks open closed lives so that they can get some air into them again.”
Let’s Pause here and breathe.
Is this what you believe? Have you experienced a kind of letting go that has led you to a new and different life? Have you experienced rebirth?
In this last verse before heading to his last walk in his beloved Jerusalem, Jesus uses the opportunity of strangers coming to him to tell his disciples what is going to happen to him and why---how his suffering and death will not be the end of the story. On top of trying to get them (and us) to see the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, he encourages them “to be reckless in their love so they can have it forever, real, and eternal.”
Dear Ones, I would like to end my sermon here and let you ponder the meaning of suffering, resurrection, and ascension, the marks of our Christian faith but I am haunted by history and a current reality. I feel the need and urgency to name it, knowing that even Jesus was ‘shaken’ by his own news of impending death.
You see Archbishop Oscar Romero from El Salvador was preaching on this passage the day he was murdered in San Salvador, in the hospital chapel while doing communion. His blood mixed with the spilled wine literally. He had become the Voice for the voiceless and the military authorities couldn’t tolerate it. He had to be executed. His bloody death became the seed for the continued uprising of the Salvadoran people for their liberation. His death did indeed become a seed for the ongoing struggle, for he rose up in them, however, at the cost of many more deaths. My deceased Salvadoran husband was one of those whose suffering from war and trauma years later would claim his own life. I sit now with the tension of how out of death comes new life and yet how we should not glorify suffering either. Jesus meets me here at this crossroad because he was shaken by this too.
And today, with over 30,000 deaths in Gaza and counting, how can all this death lead to new life? On the cover of your bulletin, you have a picture of a person’s dead hand in the rubble holding a green shoot from a date. God is in the rubble say my Palestinian Christian friends. And out of death has come a blade of new life. Is this a sign of hope? Redemptive suffering? I sit now with this tension too. I don’t want to see any more starving children, any more people killed seeking food. From the date seed, springs new life. Jesus, isn’t there another way? Come, sit with me and all those weeping mothers cradling their loved ones for the last time.
Dear Ones, if we’re all like seeds then fall into the dirt and let your lives become rooted in God, watered by Jesus’ tears so that every person you touch is magnified, celebrated, and affirmed according to the glory of God. Let us live into this blessing from the Celtic Christian scholar and poet Philip Newell: