Planted

 This week's verses are John 12:23-28:

Jesus replied, “The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the solemn truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains by itself alone. But if it dies, it produces much grain. The one who loves his life destroys it, and the one who hates his life in this world guards it for eternal life. If anyone wants to serve me, he must follow me, and where I am, my servant will be too. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.

“Now my soul is greatly distressed. And what should I say? ‘Father, deliver me from this hour’? No, but for this very reason I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”  

 These verses take place closer to the time where Jesus is betrayed, arrested, tortured in custody, and then crucified. He knows what is coming, and he is distressed. He is talking about himself, but in a way he is also talking about what it is to be a Christian.

When he says that it is time to be glorified, we can't help but picture something amazing, like in Revelation where God is on a sapphire throne with thunder and lightning and creatures praising him 24/7. But in this case, his glory will come through something horrible and humiliating.

When a seed is planted, it is disintegrated by the process that produces more seeds. You can't plant a corn plant and then dig up the seed and reuse it. It's gone. It has become the corn plant. And its grains of corn, if they don't end up as delicious tortillas, will themselves become corn plants with their own seeds.

It's counterintuitive that a destructive process could be multiplicative. How does something that destroys value produce more value? We usually think about animals, where the process seems purely multiplicative. Two rabbits produce ten rabbits which produce fifty more rabbits, minus the ones that end up in the pot. But Jesus is reminding us that there is an older system, which requires a sacrifice in order to unleash growth.

And so here Jesus is being faced with a nightmare. And that is exactly what it is. I heard a talk recently by a guy who had been tortured and put in a Turkish prison for a couple years, not knowing if he would be executed or held there for the rest of his life. He was a devout Christian who had already accepted that something like that might happen, and even then it was utterly terrifying and stressful. He said a lot of times people would just break, or go insane, because of the anguish and agony of the situation.

But Jesus doesn't go with the rabbit system, the one that says we have to be happy and warm in our burrows, colors changing as the seasons go. He says our souls follow the system of the grain. If we're warm and comfortable and seek to preserve that safety, we produce nothing. That seed is taped to a piece of cardboard and stuck in a museum. If we try to hold onto our life, and our comfort, and anything that makes us refuse the call, we waste our lives. (Or lose it, or destroy it, depending on the translation.)

So is Jesus saying we should all wear black and talk about how much we hate life? Not necessarily. Jesus enjoyed life. He feasted. He owned some nice clothes. He had good relationships with people. I think what he is saying here isn't that we should practice some kind of fleshy asceticism, but that we shouldn't let ourselves get too comfortable, too complacent, too warm and cozy to get up and answer the call.

If Jesus and "Life In This World" both call you up and want you to hang out this Saturday, which one are you going to say "Not interested" to? You can't always follow them both, so you're going to love the one and "hate" the other. Jesus says the one who serves him has to choose him and follow him. And that means saying "Not interested" to stuff we would otherwise be very interested in sometimes.

When Jesus was asked to go to the cross, he didn't say "No way, get me out of here!" Nope. That was the whole point of him being there! Instead, he said "Father, glorify your name." Do we ever say that when we face hardship, or when doing the right thing is really expensive? Usually we just say "deliver me from this hour," right?

God honors us when we serve him. And he is glorified when we serve him, when we choose him and his path over more enticing alternatives. Do we love him, who created us, and saved us? Do we love him enough that we hate the best the world has to offer in comparison? Or is comfort our master, rather than just the companion we are killing time with while waiting to be called to something better?

Next time you're finding yourself dragging your heels on doing the right thing, think of these verses. Do you want to waste your life to be comfortable? Or are you willing to plant it to produce eternally?