5 Lent Year B April 2, 2006

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.  Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been on a journey with Jesus as he has made his way traveling towards Jerusalem and all that awaits there.  Next Sunday we will celebrate Jesus’ triumphal entrance into the holy city, but this week we hear about what is, at least in John’s gospel, Jesus’ last public teaching before his arrest.  Jesus begins this teaching by saying, “The hour has come….”  The hour has come—this phrase is momentous because up until this point, Jesus has been saying, “The hour is coming….” The hour is coming, and now it is here.  What is Jesus telling his disciples, his public?  What is Jesus telling us?

Because we know “the rest of the story”, it’s easy to say that Jesus is merely warning his followers about what is to immediately follow—his arrest, his crucifixion, and his resurrection.  And on one level, that is what Jesus is talking about, but I think there is more to it.

Jesus goes from that statement that the hour has come to what almost amounts to a parable—something unusual for John’s gospel which does not contain the parables so well known in the other gospels.

“… 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.  25

There are many gardeners here at Saint Mary’s, and so I think the image of the wheat dying to release the seeds for new life is one that is familiar—we see the cycle repeated every year as flowers bloom and then go to seed, giving up in death the beginnings of new life for the next season.  It is an apt analogy for the death and resurrection of Jesus—from his dying comes our eternal life. And that is a crucial message, one that is central to our faith and our life together and one that we will be celebrating joyously in a few weeks time.  But Jesus’ message did not stop there, and I think we make it too easy for ourselves if we don’t attend to the rest of this teaching.

Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

For me, this is the hard part.  If we love our life we lose it, and only if we hate our life we have it for eternity?  This statement bears some parsing.

We are part of a culture that is all about loving life.  We are hedonists—we seek pleasure, we expect happiness; indeed we believe that pursuing happiness is one of our rights, right up there with life and liberty. I don’t think that in itself is necessarily a bad thing; it’s how we go about it that becomes problematic. Far too often in seeking happiness we attach ourselves to the idols of our culture—namely material possessions and worldly power. We spend our lives working for those things that our culture tells us will bring us pleasure—usually material things—and  we conform ourselves to the power structures that support this kind of life, even when that means abandoning the values we hold dearest.  Yes, family and friends and relationships are part of the picture, too, but far too often we measure our successfulness, our happiness, how good our life is not in terms of relationships but in terms of possessions and status.  We know that money cannot buy happiness, but that doesn’t stop us from buying things; we know that power does not confer happiness but that doesn’t seeking power—directly or indirectly,  and it seems that we can never have enough of either. We are consumers in a consumer culture and so we spend our productive years consuming.

There’s a U2 song that says, “…you can never get enough of what you don’t really need,” and that captures the problem with living this way. We can spend our whole lives consuming, seeking a happiness that often seems just out of reach. We may attain momentary happiness, but ultimately we can’t take it with us—at the end of our earthly lives what we’ve consumed in the name of loving life and being happy is gone, used up, no matter how many material possessions we leave behind. If we’ve held too tightly to these things in our lifetime, if we’ve let them become our idols, we may have also neglected to seek the nourishment that will sustain us for eternal life.  If we spend our lives loving them as our culture would have us do, we will lose it all eventually.

But the alternative presented in today’s gospel seems harsh, too.  Only those who hate their life in the world keep it for eternal life?  Does that mean we must go through life miserable and miserly, eschewing everything that brings us pleasure? I don’t think so—in fact, I think doing so is antithetical to the calling we have to be good stewards of the earth God has graciously given to us, a world we are called to delight in, to take pleasure in just as God does. No, when Jesus says that those who hate their life in this world will keep it in eternal life, I think he is calling us to separate ourselves from, to hate if you will, those things that bind us, that hold us back from living the gospel life, whatever those things might be:  materialism, consumerism, prestige, power, status. When we can hate those things, when we can break away from their power over us, then we can truly embrace the kind of life God is calling us to, both here and now and into eternity.

The truth is that Jesus is calling us to be countercultural.  Jesus is calling us to let go off those things that keep us stuck, that bind us to an earthly existence, that so consume us that there is nothing left for God’s work.  Just as the wheat releases its regenerative power in its death, so too can we redirect our energy to renewing life if we can allow our attachment to earthly things to die. Imagine what life could be like if we devoted as much energy to glorifying God as we do to glorifying the idols of our culture. Imagine what life could be like if we were as invested in caring for the earth as we are invested in using up its resources.  Imagine what life could be like if the quality of our relationships, not just with our family but with our neighbors near and far, were the true measure of our success.

Just as Jesus told his listeners in today’s gospel that the hour had come—the hour for the Son of Man to be glorified, with all that entailed, so too is Jesus telling us that the hour has come for us to consider how we live our lives. The time to let go of those things that bind us, and to embrace those things that allow us to live more fully into the gospel life to which Jesus calls us to live is now.

AMEN