Homily for 5th Sunday of Lent

Homily for the

5th Sunday of Lent

March 17, 1991

John 12: 20-33
Holy Cross, Fairfield, Conn.

As is the case far too often, our community in Silver Spring, Md., had no requests to celebrate a weekend Mass in a parish or religious house—altho we have had requests to hear children’s confessions this weekend.  Here’s an old, short homily on today’s readings.

“Unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat” (John 12: 24).

In the burial chambers of the kings of Egypt, deep inside the pyramids, their subjects left them everything they might need in their future lives:  river barges, gold, clothing, weapons, food.  Much of this treasure has been discovered intact in the last hundred years.

Imagine finding grain 3,200 to 4,000 years old.  Some scientists wondered whether it would still germinate after 3 or 4 millennia.  Egypt’s hot, dry climate, they figured, should have acted as a preservative.  They planted some of the grain and, sure enuf, it sprouted—4,000-year-old wheat!

Left in the tombs, the seed contained the germ of life, but it remained just grains of wheat.  Cast into the ground, it died but gave birth to new life, abundant fruit, even after 40 centuries.

Jesus uses the image of grains of wheat to portray himself and his followers.  If we wish to be life-giving, fruitful people, we must fall to the earth and die.  We must humble ourselves, die to ourselves, if we really want to live.

Husbands and wives experience this all the time.  Their marriage thrives only by mutual sacrifice, yielding to the wishes, hopes, needs of the beloved.  Proud, self-centered people don’t make it in marriage or in the kingdom of heaven.

Parents experience life thru death.  Rearing children is repeated death to oneself, to convenience, to plans, to free time, sometimes to sanity—but the fruit of all this sacrifice is priceless and worth all the pain, the worry, and the trouble.

Students and workers have to die repeatedly—all the sacrifices of research, study, classroom, office, or factory monotony—to achieve knowledge, skills, advancement, the satisfaction of creativity, recognition.

To thrive as followers of Jesus, to advance to eternal life, we must fall to the earth and die.  We all know how it kills us to forgive; to restrain a tendency to gossip; to turn off the TV and do something constructive; to eat less or to stop smoking so as to have some alms for the poor; to spend time with someone who’s lonely; to stop nagging or putting down a certain someone in our lives; to give time to prayer and Scripture.

Kindness begets kindness; patience begets patience; generosity begets generosity.  The good seed that falls to the earth bears abundant fruit.  People not only admire virtue.  They want to imitate it.  So we Christians have to live virtue and be imitable—dying to ourselves in the process.

The Greeks who came to Philip said, “Sir, we’d like to see Jesus” (John 12:21).  Jesus told them, “Where I am, there will my servant be” (12:26).  If we are truly Jesus’ servants—by dying to ourselves and living for him—then people will indeed see Jesus—when they see us.