Lent 5 March 29, 2009

Lent 5
March 29, 2009

Today Jesus finds himself dealing with perhaps the most subtle temptation he’s ever faced.
The temptation is not obvious. The story seems perfectly straightforward: Some Greeks who’ve arrived in Jerusalem for the Passover ask to see Jesus.
This is good news, isn’t it? It means that Jesus has become a celebrity even among Gentiles and foreigners. “Hey, while you’re in Jerusalem, try and see that Jesus fellow we’re hearing so much about.”
Philip and Andrew go to Jesus and tell him, with some excitement, because this means Jesus’ message and fame are spreading.
Jesus’ response is, on the face of it, bizarre.
He begins talking about seeds and fruit and dying and hating life and loving life and his hour is coming . . . –what in heaven’s name does all this have to do with the good news that a couple of Gentiles, non-Jews, from Greece, want to be introduced?

What’s going on?
I mentioned a temptation. Here it is: Jesus understands that if the Gentiles are coming to him, if his good news is spreading, maybe he won’t need to go through with the persecution and death he knows is coming. Maybe all he needs to do is back off from his message a little bit. Maybe he doesn’t have to challenge the temple authorities with such abandon. Maybe a little compromise—how much difference could that make?
Jesus is tempted. Like any human being, Jesus fears death. And the time is getting closer—it will be a only few more days, he suspects, until the soldiers will seize him and all the diabolical/human forces of evil will spring into action.
“Now my soul is troubled.” That’s as much as he says about it, but that’s enough to reveal that he wasn’t rushing joyfully toward crucifixion. He’s afraid. The arrival of the Greek fans indicates to him a way to get off the hook. This is Jesus’ moment of temptation. It’s so quick—a nanosecond of wanting to say “no—let’s do it another way.”
Jesus feels the excitement, the lure of success in worldly terms, among his disciples—the hope bubbling up that they’ve arrived.
And he dashes that hope, for himself and for them. “Unless a seed falls into the earth and dies,” he says to himself and to them, “it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Seeds. Every seed has a thin coat around it which protects it from taking in oxygen from the air. A seed is for all intents and purposes dead.
But then it lands in soil. It enters into a place of risk, a place of darkness.
Jesus must have felt that he was being cast down into that very same darkness, facing execution. How he must have wanted to be successful, to hold onto his life. But he needed to do as the seed does —go down into risk and uncertainty and death.
But this temptation isn’t just Jesus’. Every Christian, every human, tries to some extent to seek safety rather than new life.
We are seeds who refuse to “die” when we assert that our little selves come before anybody else. We can only break open by dying to the good old American attitude that the purpose of my life is my self fulfillment and “having it all.” We have to die to preoccupation with the big ME and my successes, my failures, and what other people are thinking about me. Die to the idea that I am the center of the universe. Spiritual growth means cracking the tough coating of our self-protectiveness and self-absorption to open up to the real needs of other people.

Inside every seed is an embryo, and in that embryo is a root which goes down into the ground, and a shoot that goes up into the sky. Every embryo has a root and a shoot.
When the dormant seed is planted into the ground and the soil temperature is right, the seed begins to take in water. It begins to expand, the seed coat is broken, embryo begins to mature and produce sugar and protein. Then out come the tiny root and the tiny shoot, and the shoots produce plants which produce more seed which produce more fruit. New life, resurrection.
That’s why Jesus knew he had to go down into death. He trusted that in some unknown way God would burst the seed of his dying forth into new life.
We too need to yield ourselves to be cracked open by the life-giving force of God working within us. It may hurt a little or a lot, but finally it will produce the tiny root, the tiny shoot.

This strange logic of the seed—and the cross—continues today.
Almost exactly 29 years today, Archbishop Oscar Romero preached a sermon in the cathedral in San Salvador. Over his brief time as archbishop, Romero had changed from a careful, conservative official of the church, to an activist mystic in passionate solidarity with the country’s impoverished peasants. He daily put himself at risk.
Romero’s text that morning of the Fifth Sunday of Lent was the same as ours today. Here is part of what he preached: “You have just heard in Christ’s Gospel that one must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and that those who fend off the danger will lose their lives. But whoever out of love for Christ gives themselves to the service of others will live, like the grain of wheat that dies, but only apparently. If it did not die, it would remain alone . . . .Only in dying does it produce the harvest.”
Less than fifteen minutes later, as he prepared the altar for Eucharist, Salvadorean soldiers shot Archbishop Romero dead.
“If it did not die, it would remain alone . . . Only in dying does it produce the harvest.”

Where are your places of darkness, your places of risk?
It wasn’t easy for Jesus, it wasn’t easy for Archbishop Romero, it won’t be easy for each of us to take the leap that propels us down into the “necessary darkness” that leads to the cracking of the shell and the miracles of the little shoots, the little roots, of new life.