Springtime.
The mind and imagination turn toward planting, gardening and yard work.
Have you ever seen a piece of earth where nothing would grow?
It could be a naturally occurring piece of geography, a desert, a salt flat, some strange mineral deposit close to the surface.
Or perhaps a piece of earth destroyed through human contamination like industrial waste. A gas can spills in the back yard, a tanker crashes, an oil line ruptures.
Dead earth is the result. Nothing grows.
How to recover that dead spot?
Let new soil lowly sediment over it accruing over the decades and centuries?
Dig up the bad earth and replace with good earth? But we still have to take that dead soil somewhere. Anderson has had its fair share of environmental recovery projects.
What if all creation were dying, wasting away? How to restore a dying earth?
John’s Gospel sees creation as an industrial waste catastrophe. Creation is a miraculous event that has been mismanaged and used up, wasted, life is receding.
The Word made all things, made life itself and the spark of the human soul. The Word speaks and life begins.
How to restore what was once beautifully spoken but is now poorly pronounced?
The Word must die.
The Word must reseed the earth with new life.
And the life is the life that is God.
Like a grain of wheat, a seed that dies and bears much fruit.
The Word must die to reseed the earth with life once more.
The Gospel can be understood and imagined in many different ways.
Today we see the Gospel spoken as the replanting of Eden. And the cost of that replanting?
Jesus must die. The Word must die.
The new life can only come from Jesus.
He is getting ready for the cross. He will soon be arrested. Jesus doesn’t have much more time to help the disciples understand.
So Jesus speaks of a grain of wheat falling into the earth and dying so that there will be much fruit.
A simple and beautiful image of wheat shrouding the brutality of death on the cross.
John’s Gospel understands the body of believers, the Church, as the fruit of the replanting and reseeding of a dying earth.
The Gospel is an environmental reclamation project of cosmic scale.
Have you ever felt like a piece of dead earth?
Bad dirt where nothing will grow?
A grain of wheat is falling into the earth of our barren lives.
Let the Gospel replant, renew what was dead that life may rise again.
Be that fruitful planting reclaiming a dead place.
Follow the same pattern.
Share the life that is yours, that has been given to you; that the fruit will spread, that this dying earth will teem with life once more.
It’s spring time.
The mind, the imagination turn to planting, gardening, yard work, we turn toward Holy Week toward that grain of wheat falling into the earth and dying and then… and then green shoots sprouting, growing and spreading.