Readings for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, March 21, 2021
Jeremiah 31.31-34 | Psalm 51 | Hebrews 5.7-9 | John 12.20-33
What is it like to be a seed that refuses to die? Clinging desperately to a gift that was given, the seed refuses to let go of the gift. The seed has had a good life as part of a plant that grew from an earlier seed. That plant broke the surface of the ground to face the sun and to be touched by a warm breeze. Water, heat and fertile soil – gifts also – brought the plant to maturity. As it matured, it began to grow seeds of its own so as to pass the gift of life onto a new generation.
But what if the seeds renounce their role? Then, there is sort of a living death, or rather a barren life. The seeds cling to their own reality and fail to pass on the life they were created to bear. Such seeds lay lifeless in the frozen ground of winter. When spring comes, they have failed to preserve their lives and disintegrate into dust. Such a tragedy!
So it is with humans. To surrender the self is paradoxically to realize our destiny. A person is born to transcend itself, to see beyond itself. Any insight into its condition reveals the necessity to be grateful to God and others. In its self-transcendence, the person lets go of its wealth, its desires, even its life in order to bear fruit in the lives of others, in order to enter eternal life. Only in the loss of self is the self regained.
This is the core of the Christian message. To give one’s life is to gain a life beyond our imaginings. Not only after death, but even now. Eternal life is the letting go of self, a self-giving that goes beyond mere duty to do the unexpected, to re-gift the gift we have received.
When the Greeks came to the festival, Jesus knew that his hour had come. No longer was he living for and preaching to only his own people. He now had a universal mission. That mission was one of self-sacrifice, and understandably he is troubled. But Jesus’ mission is also the mission of every one of us. “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.”
The action of every individual is crucial. What each person does rings up and down the ages and from one pinpoint of the world to every forgotten corner. Rabbi Abraham Heschel begins his book, The Prophets, by noting that the most minute indiscretions scandalize the prophets. The prophets have little to say about the great questions of metaphysics and the cosmos. But a single act of injustice is a disaster. Likewise, Jesus says, “whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple” gives it to the eternal God (Matthew 10.42).
No act is too small to affect the destiny of humanity. From Sunday’s Gospel: “The person who loves their life loses it, and the person who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Those who are the authors of even the smallest act of injustice in order to fulfill their own desires are like the seed that refuses to die. And the very rocks and hills and valleys lament because of it.
Everything is God’s gift. We can make our lives a gift as well. We do that by letting go of life so that God and others might be glorified.