Life after burial
Sermon for the 5th Sunday in Lent, year B
Bible reading: John 12:20-33
Paramedics, fire fighters, police, and others who are involved in critical incidents, where there has been significant injury or loss of life, as in a car accident or bushfire, do a wonderful job, don’t they? At considerable cost to themselves; not just in regard to their time and energy.
Long after their involvement in the critical incident, they have to carry the stress and trauma of what they have seen. Think of firefighters and police who discovered the burned remains of people in their cars recently, and the effect this would have on you. Emergency services personnel often need help and counseling in order to process this. It effects them deeply.
Why? Because when you come head to head with an experience like this, you are confronted with and reminded of the reality of your mortality – of the fact that your life is finite, that our lives here in this world will end.
It is somewhat similar for those who face serious illness and uncertainty; when we face an experience that shows us this, it’s like – as one psychologist describes it – a ‘little death’, a little brush with death, or as an old Yiddish proverb puts it, our foot feels the edge of the grave
.
And sometimes, when we have a little taste of death through a critical incident or an injury or illness experience in our lives, it can be very hard to deal with. People react in sometimes quite extreme ways. They may have nightmares or dreams about dying or other symptoms. It can be very troubling.
In today’s Gospel Jesus is facing up to this very nightmare. But it’s no dream. He is approaching the ultimate experience of his mortality as a human being. Now my soul is troubled
he says in verse 27. Because he is preparing for not a little death, a brush with death, but death itself.
As he prepares himself, he also helps his disciples to understand what is about to happen. He explains it with these words in verse 24:
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.
He is of course explaining that he must die and be buried so that his resurrection can bring eternal life; not only to him of course, but to all of us, who are the fruit of his resurrection.
He is talking here about the pathway he is opening up for all his disciples (including you and me) to follow – through death to life. Not around death, not over the top of it, but through it.
This is the path, the pattern Jesus is establishing for all of us. But there’s a deeper reality here too.
This pattern of death and new life is not just the over-all pattern that our lives will follow as we physically die and rise again to eternal life. This is the pattern that recurs again and again in the very fabric of our lives, here and now. It does not just happen once, but over and over again, many times, in large and small ways, as we journey through this life.
Our lives are made up of lots of “little deaths and resurrections”.
We have to deal with traumatic and painful experiences big and small. Some of these are our own fault and the result of our own sin and, and we are called to face up to this in repentance. Sometimes it seems the problems we face are the fault of others. Often it all melts into one big mess. And in each of these experiences God is doing something with us.
… 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.
Just as our final dying will be transformed into eternal life with and through Christ, so in our ‘little death’ experiences along the way, we, through the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, are also transformed by Christ – so more and more we grow into him.
After death and burial comes resurrection. That is what this Lenten journey we are on together is all about: we were told back on Ash Wednesday ‘remember you are dust’, and we will be told on Easter Sunday ‘Christ is risen and we are risen’.
This is the mysterious baptismal pattern of our lives – the seed falls into the earth and springs up new and green; death and resurrection; repentance and rebirth, suffering and growth, cross and victory.
I don’t know how many times I have listened to people relate how something very painful and difficult in their lives has changed them, turned their attitudes and their views around, made them totally rethink how they live their lives, led to turning back from a wrong direction they were taking, brought them back to Christ.
Have you ever noticed, I wonder, that people who are very compassionate and caring toward others often have learned, have been formed into these special qualities by their own very hard experiences of mortality. They tend not to be such harsh judges of others when they fall, because they themselves know the pain and shame of falling. They understand the fears and anxieties. They tend to allow others room to be human, to be imperfect. They tend to be ready to receive others in a generous and loving way.
Seeds fall into the earth and die, in order to bring forth fruit. Think for a moment how God has shaped you through a very tough and hard time in your life; has strengthened your faith or softened your heart through that. And if now is a time of hard testing for you, hold onto the hope that there is resurrection – God will use even this, turning this suffering to good, shaping you into his own image, calling you to die so that your life may show forth his resurrection power even more.
In this way God multiplies our grains of wheat – the old is buried and the new rises, more fruitful. Throughout our life, this pattern goes on, Christ forms and transforms us, so that we and all our old baggage may decrease, and Christ may increase.
So often, we think we will be happy ourselves and also be able to help others if we are strong and competent and on top of life – whether in our professional life or our Spiritual life or in any other way.
But this is not the pattern Jesus has set for us: he takes us a strange and different path, the way of the cross. He takes us to the grave. He plants us in the ground. So often it is not our strengths that enable us to help others, but our wounds, and our injuries and our scars and our weakness.
This is the great mystery that is being revealed through our lives as disciples of Jesus. Where I am there will my servant be also
, he says – buried in the earth and raised in glory.