A Seed Must Fall to the Ground - A Homily for the Fifth Sunday in Lent
A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on March 17, 2024, the Fifth Sunday in Lent.
“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” Through the prophet Jeremiah we hear this beautiful promise that the Lord is making a new covenant with God’s people. Covenant is God’s promise of steadfast loving relationship with us: “I will be your God, and you shall be my people.” God promises to be with us and for us, to be faithful to us even when we are unfaithful—a huge relief! Divine love is set on us as a seal, unbreakable. It’s written on our hearts. Unlike on Mt. Sinai, where after the Exodus the Ten Commandments are inscribed on stone tablets written by the finger of God, this time God will write the law in our hearts. How does the word of God get written on our hearts? It’s God’s covenant, so God will do it. Very often, it seems we are taught through what we suffer. I’ve often taken an admittedly warped sort of comfort from the Greek playwright Aeschylus, who wrote, “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” (Agamemnon.) You see why they call him the father of tragedy. For Christians the law gets written on the human heart as the Word becomes Flesh, through Jesus’s taking up of our human nature and living as one of us. He does it for us: gives us hearts of flesh where before there was only stone, and writes God’s covenant there. Jesus’s saving death and resurrection become the new Covenant in his blood into which we are baptized, in which we participate, and yes, where we learn as we share in his sufferings and in his glory.
There are a lot of people who get very antsy when we talk about the redemptive value of suffering, and I am one of them. There are many wrong ways to take this. Here’s what I’m not suggesting, I’m not suggesting that we seek out and imitate Christ’s extremes of suffering, as if to try to redeem ourselvesthrough masochistic submission. I’m not suggesting that we place ourselves in the way of harm or outright abuse falsely justified as the trials God is sending us for our benefit. I’m not suggesting that we explain away the heart-wrenching horrors of this hurting world where we are called to bear witness to the sorrows of our neighbors and the cry for justice. But given that we are mortal human beings who cannot escape the swift and varied changes of the world in which we live, given that, like it or not, we do suffer, it’s a comfort to know that there is nothing, nothing from which is our good and merciful God can fail to draw meaning and purpose and new life. So we don’t have to seek out suffering to be redeemed. We simply are suffering, we are in need, and in that suffering and need we are united to the sufferings of Jesus our redeemer, who has gone ahead of us and made a way for through the impossible.
In our Gospel today Jesus is talking to his disciples about his coming death. “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.” This is the logic of death and resurrection, of necessary dissolution and disintegration in the service of new life and Easter joy. What needs to fall to the ground in order for your life to bear fruit? Jesus is willing to trust God with everything. “I can do nothing on my own,” we hear him say in John. Jesus trusted God to save him from death. He’s content to trust God for everything. When he’s driven into the wilderness after his baptism, Jesus resists the temptation to prove himself. He lets God feed him in the desert where he is ministered to by angels. He goes to the cross in the same obedient trust that he is cared for, that his Father will lead him and vindicate him, bring him through the Exodus he is making for all humankind to emerge victorious over death, coming through where there was no way through.
Taking the first step into the raging Red Sea must have felt like a kind of death for the children of Israel. 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. Jesus’s death is the way through for us. He did it and he does it, the law has been written in our hearts. Ours is to trust God and let ourselves fall apart. To let the seed fall to the ground. Let the hard shell of accumulated layers of stony protection around our hearts crack. What’s rigid, hardened and fixed in us has to come apart, so a freer, more fluid, natural responsiveness can emerge. Self-reliance and all our attempts to prove ourselves need to fall to the ground at the foot of the cross. The seed dies and falls into the earth so that something new can be born. Our old and hardened ways crack open and slough off slowly as God gives the growth and makes room for something new.
It’s very hard to trust this process of dissolution, this coming undone that is so graced and still so threatening. It’s utterly threatening to the rigid and stony ways we have adapted to and protected ourselves in a broken world. Letting the seed fall to the ground feels like losing our life, just as Jesus says. How can he say that? He says it from the bedrock conviction of the covenant: “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” He says it out of total trust and intimacy with the God he dares to call Father. And he is determined to share that divine life and love with us. “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” Hear the desire and love and also the confidence in this! The assurance. I will draw all people to myself. The Greek work we have translated as “draw” is stronger than that: I will haul all people to myself, I will pull all people to myself, I will drag all people to myself. Jesus the fisherman is going to reel us all home. Lifted high on the cross, he becomes the means of our healing and salvation as we lift our weary eyes.
Today is the final Sunday in Lent before Palm Sunday launches us headfirst into the Paschal mystery of death and resurrection. Walking the way of the cross in Holy Week is its own kind of undoing, a falling to the ground and rising again with our Lord. Each of the liturgies are powerful entry points into the life and death and resurrection of Christ. As we wave palms in procession and confess that we too shout “Crucify him,” as we wash each other’s feet and receive Eucharist in remembrance of the one who loves us, as we keep vigil in the church stripped bare, as we fall to the ground to kiss the wood of the cross, as we wait in silence at the tomb, and as we gather around the new fire to light our candles and hear of God’s saving work, let’s be attentive to the undoing that God is working in each of us.
What needs to fall to the ground, so love can spring up?
What new shoots begin to poke through the thawing earth?
One of the great Easter hymns we’ll sing on the other side of Holy Week puts it this way:
Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
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.
Amen.