Only grain that dies bears fruit
(Free Version)- The The Fifth Sunday in Lent- Year B; Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33
Painting by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), Painted in 1967.
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Our readings this week are marked by contrasts: there was an Old Covenant, and now there is a New Covenant (Jeremiah 31:31-34); there was a certain kind of priesthood, but there has always also been a different priesthood (Hebrews 5:5-10); there is the way of fame and notoriety, of power, the way of saving one’s life and then there is the way of the grain of wheat, the way of death, the way of losing one’s life (John 12:20-33).
These contrasts are not nice and neat, and I would caution you from making them so. For example, the contrast between the Old and New Covenants is not quite as neat as we often like to make it. Also, the author of Hebrews is not disparaging the Levitical priesthood. It may suffice to say that the way of Jesus is always surprising. It does not fit with the expectations we bring along with us.
In our Old Testament reading (Jeremiah 31:31-34), we hear of a new covenant, a new way of being in relationship with God. It has some continuity to the previous covenant. God will remain faithful and will be in relationship with them. But something about this new covenant is a deep work of transformation—God placing God’s own heart within his people. This new covenant will not be focused on restraint: on avoiding certain things, but on a complete heart change. What God does in his people, of course, is always consistent with God’s character, and always a foreshadowing of what God will do for the whole world. Central to this new way of being is God’s forgiveness of their sins, remembering them no more.
In our New Testament reading (Hebrews 5:5-10), the author explains how Jesus is high priest even though he is not from the Levitical line. He is from a different priesthood, one that existed before the Levitical priesthood, the order of Melchizedek, who was both a priest and a king, and was priest before Israel herself existed.
Jesus, like other priests, offers prayers and supplications on behalf of the people, but his priesthood is defined by his suffering. He stands in solidarity with our suffering, out of his free choice. In doing so, he saves us from our sin and leads the path for us to a new humanity.
In our gospel reading (John 12:20-33), Andrew and Philip introduce Jesus to some Greeks who are interested in meeting Jesus. Rather than recruiting them into the fold, seeking to accelerate the growth of the Jesus movement, Jesus seems to dismiss them out-of-hand, immediately pivoting to a conversation about his impending death. How’s that for an evangelism strategy! Not only that, but he invites his followers to walk this path with him, to be willing to lose their life.
Jesus uses this really interesting metaphor of a seed and a plant. A seed bears fruit only if you plant it. You have to let go of the seed, to say goodbye to the seed. In some sense, there is a kind of death, a loss, a burial before the seed bears fruit.
Poet and farmer Wendell Berry observes as he works in his hillside woodlots, “where the creation is yet fully alive and continuous and self-enriching, whatever dies enters directly into the life of the living . . . ” 1
Jesus is constantly reminding them that he is going to the cross. But that somehow, in his death, there will be a new kind of life, the kind of life that can’t be seen in just the seed. It is organically connected to the seed, but it is something all together different. Berry wrote,
The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark? 2
May we live into the contrasts, embracing the new life that God has given us, but not because it is new—it is not novelty that we are after. What we are embracing is the very heart of God. God is with us, indeed in our very hearts. Our sins are forgiven, remembered no more. May we trust the high priest who has entered into our sufferings, crying with tears on our behalf, saving us. May we follow the way of the seed, not grasping on to our lives, but letting them go. May we rest in the divine life of God into which we are invited. And may we know God’s love which is at the heart of it all.
Tom Mundahl, "Fifth Sunday of Lent (March 21) in Year B (Mundahl18)” Lutherans Restoring Creation, March 21, 2018, https://lutheransrestoringcreation.org/tag/wendell-berry/.
Wendell Berry, “The Man Born to Farming” The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 1998).