As I am serving a Maronite Parish this weekend, this homily will not be delivered at Mass
Ezekiel 37: 12-14 + Psalm 130 + Romans 8: 8-11 + John 11: 1-45
I spent much of my life in Oklahoma. Other than oil and gas, cattle and horses, it is wheat country. Wheat and Rice are probably the most fundamental source of nourishment around the world. So, it’s not surprising that the one who will feed us on his body and blood would use the image of a wheat grain to describe his future.
The whole cycle of farming up there in Oklahoma and throughout the wheat belt was fascinating to me, a city boy whose first assignment as a pastor was to a little country town where the entire congregation was farming families except for the Postmaster. At the end of summer, just a little before the first frost, the wheat gets planted, and if it rains, by November, the fields are green as far as you can see. By the first of December, the cattle are turned out to feed on the green wheat. Then, toward the end of February, they cattle are taken off the wheat which then grows for three months until it turns golden in late May and early June when harvest begins. The whole cycle happens because of one thing: rain – water. If it does not rain, there is no food. If it does not rain there is no life.
It is an amazing cycle that gives us both grain and meat. Both have to die for us to have food to live. In my mind, that grain becomes bread that then becomes flesh the food at this altar that gives us life. The whole natural cycle shapes our liturgy in this church. First the water of Baptism that brings us to life, then as we grow up we learn to love and serve those around us, dying to self or selfishness like that wheat grain so that we might be born again.
The church puts these ideas in our head on the last Sunday before Holy Week because we are inevitably headed toward a death on Good Friday and toward our own inevitable death. We know the truth even though it might frighten or make some uneasy. We are born to die, and every day we die a little more moving one day closer to that moment when we shall be planted or buried in the earth. Only those who die to themselves really ever live a full and fruitful life. The self-centered, leave nothing behind and bear no fruit. Those who die a little each day to selfishness, to pretense, and to sin hold the promise of a new life that is the fruit that springs from their dying. Every time we pass from one stage of life to another something in us dies and something new is born. We taste death in moments of loneliness, rejection, sorrow, disappointment, and failure. Some die before their time living in bitterness, hatred, and solation. We create our own death by the way we live.
What Jesus teaches us is that when we forget ourselves that we are most free and most happy. It is getting out of ourselves, in dedicating ourselves to causes beyond ourselves, that we grow and bear fruit. The world is poorer and more hungry when people put their own personal safety, security and self-advancement first and last. When people are willing to go beyond themselves and die to self-interest the most precious things humanity possesses have been born.
Jesus gave his life. It was not taken from him. He gave it out of love of God and love of us. To love is to accept that one might die another kind of death, before one dies at the end of life. The way of love is the way of the cross which leads to the resurrection. As priest standing countless times at a bedside for someone’s final moment of life, I have come to believe that those who have died to themselves throughout life find the moment of physical death easy. The hour of death becomes an hour of glory. It is by dying that we are born to eternal life.