March 29, 2009 at Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK
Jeremiah 31: 31-35 + Psalm 51 + Hebrews 5: 7-9 + John 12:20 -33
To an age and culture that prizes individuality this Gospel suggests something that might prove troubling. To people who find their identity by establishing and maintaining their unique difference from others this Gospel is almost unintelligible. Singularity and the ideology of individualism is a hoax; a lie that is the surest sign of sin’s presence in this world. From the very first reflection on the condition of sinful humankind in Genesis, to these words of Jesus in John’s Gospel the action and the will of God has been to restore the unity, wholeness and oneness of creation with the creator. It is not good to be alone! And so, a single grain of wheat opens up this message for us putting us in touch with what Jesus reveals as the will of His Father. The example Jesus uses is a grain of wheat. This is not an agricultural lesson. The point is not so much the object as it is the singleness. The adjective, single is the point; not the noun, wheat. It is the single grain that dies in its singularity. What dies is not the wheat, because it brings more wheat. What dies is singularity, the individuality. When it falls to the ground it is transformed and ceases to be a single grain.
That death or that passing away opens the way to life as God has planned and willed it. For that single grain there will never be a head of wheat until the individuality passes away. It is the singleness, the individuality, the separateness that must die before all the grains it produces can be harvest together.
This is the mystery of the incarnation opening up for us. Human and Divine separated by sin loose their separate condition and become one. The work of that One who is the Christ is the restoration of the oneness of the human condition. Think of what he does again and again with his signs: the lepers are restored to their relationship with the community from which they were separated by that disease; a dead girl, a centurion’s son, the sleeping Lazarus are brought back not just to life but restored to the relationships and family to which they belong. If the signs He works are not enough, listen to the prayer: “Father, that they may all be one as we are one.”
In these verses today, when Jesus exclaims that the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified, it is his response to the Greeks who have come to Philip and Andrew. He recognizes that his work is nearly complete. Those outsiders, those Greeks, are now coming in! The differences that have kept them apart are going away, the separate grain dies, and something new is coming to life.
The struggle that Jesus experiences is the struggle we all know only too well. The individual self dies hard. The independent spirit does not give up easily. Doing it my way, having my way, doing my thing, keeping my stuff, is not the way of life in Christ.
We are so locked into this thinking and this behavior. We start early in life thinking and too often saying: “Look what I did!” When in truth no one of us every does a thing by ourselves; but we think we have, and we are quick to suggest that there is something grand in that assumption.
This is what it means to die to self or to lose one’s life: It means to lose that separate, individualized, isolated, life for the sake of being one with all others and the Christ/God.
This was the work of Jesus: to become one and lose himself in others: to become one with the sinner and the outcast, to become one with the sick, the hungry, and the thirsty, to become one with the seekers and questioners, the married at Cana and the single young man who came wanting to be perfect. He even became one with the dead so that in the isolation of death, the divine presence might bring them all to rise on the last day.
In this divine plan we discover the meaning of what it means to be church: not separate congregations doing their own thing. This is why Paul says in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. All that makes us distinct, separate from one another and therefore from God must die, must pass away. When it does, the compassion of Christ will be known and shared by all. We will bear one another’s burdens because the burden of one is the burden of all. The hungry and the homeless will be fed and find shelter because no one will ever think that the food they have or their home is their own. Privilege will not mean possessions and power, but rather opportunities and duties. Remaining a single grain offers no promise of life, but when all that keeps us apart passes away and we lose that kind of life – we shall be transformed and finally have life everlasting.