Lent V
In John's Gospel, Jesus gives a long farewell address to his disciples -- several chapters of sayings, exhortations, self-description, and spiritual advice -- as if they were gathered around various couches, dining together like in Plato. (It's a discourse and setting that would be familiar to readers of Greek language literature contemporary to the Gospels.)
We read from this section this Sunday as it is time to turn toward Holy Week -- Palm Sunday is next week, believe it, or not. The Paschal Mystery (Paschal comes from the same root as the anglicized 'Passover') and 'Easter' wait for no one, and arrive for all.
What strikes me most immediately is that this Jesus - John's Jesus - knows what is coming. He knows that now is the time for him to die, to undergo suffering. So, he's going to take time to understand it, to talk about it, and to prepare those who love him.
We, though, don't know the extent or timing of the periods of our life. Certainly, most of us can not foresee our deaths, or those of most others. And, the smaller things and their proportion and meaning can elude us, like how long will I need to wait at the dentist, or in line at the store? Or, how long will this period of Pandemic last? What season are we in?
What season are you in, and how do you know?
I was thinking of this because I just went to a funeral. Not in-person, no. It was an online Zoom (ubiquitous zooooom) gathering, the full funeral rite from the Book of Common Prayer, Rite I, for a lovely woman in her 90s from my old community in Brattleboro, Vermont. Among the readings was the famous passage from Ecclesiastes that tells us that there is a season for everything. Poetically, it deals in binaries (birth, death; gathering, scattering...), but the whole spectrum is implied. A season for everything, seemingly marked out.
How do we know what season we're in? Or how long it will last? Or what it will mean when placed next to the other times and seasons of our lives, the lives of others, the lifespan of our species and its habitation here on this watery planet?
When I was a child, falling and scraping my knee could seem to last forever. My sense of time had little perspective, and suffering certainly was an all-consuming experience of the present moment. Ow. As I have grown older, I have learned that knees will heal, and that that sort of pain lasts for a brief season.
Other times and seasons are less clear. When is something ending, and what will its meaning have been? What is growing, taking root, in me or among us and what will it mean?
Jesus tells his disciples that if a seed stays separate, or in a pile of grain, it will stay separate, inviolate. But when it is dropped into the soil, it roots, grows, and gives fruit.
Jesus uses this to illustrate his own death and its flowering into new life beyond imagining. He tells the disciples to follow him in this fearless dying to rise again, and that he will lead the way for them in this Way of being.
He tells them that to live in this awareness is to be free of the grip of the fear of death.
We may only realize the import of something after it has dropped into the earth, 'died,' and flowered in strange ways. "Oh," we might say. "That's what that was for."
The whole of my lifetime may be a season that takes flowering in my dying; it may be that my manner of living will be itself a seed bearing fruit. When does one thing end and another begin?
All times and places are held in God, who Jesus tells us is love. May we come to flower, freed from the fear of dying. Fall into the earth, daily, giving yourself like the seed, trusting that God is continually bringing a new thing into being, among and within us.