Jer 31. 31-34, John 12.20-33
In today’s Gospel story, from John
chapter 12, we’re told that some Greeks come to see Philip and Andrew, two of
Jesus’ disciples. They want Philip and Andrew to introduce them to Jesus. Why seek
out these two disciples in particular? It may be because both Philip and Andrew
have Greek names, rather than Hebrew or Aramaic ones. They come from Bethsaida
which was in a very ethnically mixed area of Galilee, where there were a lot of
Greek speaking people, brought up in the Greek cultural world. Jewish families often
chose Greek names for their children, because that would help them to fit in
and get on. So perhaps these Greeks think Philip and Andrew will speak their
language not just literally, but in the sense that they will understand their
thinking?
As it happens, Philip and Andrew feature as a bit of a double
act in an earlier story in John’s Gospel too. They are the only disciples named
in John’s account of the feeding of the 5000, back in chapter six. They don’t
have a lot to say otherwise, so I wonder whether it is just a coincidence, or
whether John means us to connect these stories.
Let’s go back to that earlier story. Jesus sees a hungry
crowd of people coming towards him. “How shall we buy bread for these people to
eat?” Jesus asks Philip. Philip hasn’t got a clue – even six months wages
wouldn’t scratch the surface of their hunger, he says. But Andrew comes across a
small child keen to share his or her lunch, five loaves and two fishes, and
that turns out to be enough for this vast crowd.
Unsurprisingly, having been fed one day, many of the crowd
turn up looking for Jesus the next day too. It seems there is such thing as a
free lunch, after all, and if there’s one free lunch, who knows? – maybe
ther’ll be another! Alas, they are disappointed. It isn’t so. Jesus’ miracles
aren’t just tricks to wow the crowds. His miracles – though John always calls
them “signs” in his Gospel – point to a deeper message and draw people into a
renewed relationship with God.
The miraculous lunch wasn’t just food; it was meant to remind
those who ate it of the time when Moses had led the people of Israel out of
slavery in Egypt towards their new Promised Land. To get there they had to go
out into the desert, where there wasn’t any food, but they didn’t starve. God
fed them with manna which appeared miraculously on the ground every morning. The
message was that God was at work again, leading people to freedom in a new
kingdom, and that he would provide food for the journey through Christ.
Philip and Andrew were key to that story, and they are key to
this one too. I don’t think that’s an accident, because this is also a story
about bread, or at least the first stage of producing it. There aren’t any
loaves in the passage we heard, but there is a grain of wheat, one single
grain, which falls into the ground, apparently disappearing into the mud. It turns
out, though, that what looks like death for that wheat seed is actually the
beginning of new and bountiful life. It breaks open, and is destroyed in the
process, but from it comes a whole new plant, which bears many more grains of
wheat - twenty fold? sixty fold? Even a hundred grains might have come from
that one small seed. The multiplication
of the loaves and the fishes was very impressive, but the natural miracle of
sowing and reaping is perhaps even more spectacular, and it happens under our
noses all the time.
Seed sowing at the vicarage is well under way now. There are baby
tomato plants, chillis, sunflowers, and a whole host of other things sprouting
and growing on every available windowsill. Every year it’s an act of faith. The
seeds seem so tiny when I sow them, and I can be waiting weeks before anything
happens, wondering if they have actually just rotted away. But the life in a
seed is stronger than we can imagine, and pretty soon, there are roots and
shoots, and not enough room to grow them all on. Every seed is a miracle
waiting to happen. It’s in their nature to be miraculous, to produce life out
of what looks like death.
Jesus knows that, like a seed, he is about to be sown, buried
in a cold stone tomb. It will look like it’s all over for him. But his death
won’t be the end; it will be the beginning of a new world, because the
life-giving love of God will turn out to be stronger than the death-dealing
hatred of those who want to be rid of him.
My guess is that, when those Greeks got to hear Jesus’ response
to them, it would have puzzled them greatly. Classical Greek philosophy taught
that God was immovable, perfect, unchangeable, far off in a distant heaven. If
they’d come with that in their minds, as they probably had, they’d have a lot
of trouble getting their heads around the idea that God could be in this
carpenter from Nazareth, in the messiness of human life, in the agony and
humiliation of crucifixion, in a battered, dead body. The cross would challenge
everything they thought they knew about divinity, as it does for all of us. It
is often only when we are broken ourselves, like that disintegrating
grain of wheat, that we understand the cross, because it is then that we find
the life of God springing up in us as we let go of our own attempts to hold it
all together.
Authentic faith, the kind that is written on our hearts, not
just on tablets of stone, as the prophet Jeremiah said, nearly always seems to
come from a place of brokenness, surrender, failure.
This week sees the anniversary of the beginning of the first
coronavirus lockdown last year. We’re marking it with a recorded service on
Tuesday, and you are also invited, if you would like to, to come and tie a
ribbon to our remembrance tree by the lychgate, and to put a light in your
window at 8 o’clock on Tuesday evening if you’d like to. This has been a year
when we may all have felt like that grain of wheat sometimes, buried in the mud
of grief and fear and stress and the grinding complications of just getting by.
It may have been hard for all of us to hold onto hope sometimes – perhaps it
still is - to believe that things could ever be normal again. But these
readings today tell us that down there in the mud isn’t always a bad place to
be, that feeling broken may be not the end. It may be a beginning too, the
place we find that same life-giving love which raised Jesus from the dead, and
which never runs out.
A free lunch of loaves and fishes is great now and then, to
keep us from starving, but Jesus wants more for us than that. He wants us not
just to eat the bread he gives us, but to be the wheat, which grows and
multiplies and brings life to others too, and there’s no way to do that except
to fall into the good ground of his love, accept ourselves for who we are, with
all our frailties, and allow him to raise us to new life.
Amen
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