Jeremiah 31: 31 – 34 / Psalm 51: 1 – 13 / Hebrews 5: 5 – 10 / John 12: 20 – 33
This
is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker
on Sunday, March 21, 2021.
“DYING, THAT NEW LIFE MIGHT COME”
(Homily
text: John 3: 14 – 21)
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of
wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears
much fruit.”
Our Lord is speaking, now, in these words, of His
coming death and resurrection. From here on in John’s Gospel narrative, the
focus will be on the coming events of Good Friday and Easter.
It’s quite common for our Lord to make use of
agricultural illustrations to point to a spiritual truth. After all, in the
culture of that time and place, many, if not most, people had a very familiar
relationship with growing things. Though many of us today have a much less
familiar relationship with farming and with growing things in order to eat, we
can still experience the truth of Jesus’ words in the created order around us.
For example, we live in a very beautiful area here in central Pennsylvania. We
are surrounded by hard wood forests. A brief walk on a trail in those woods
will confirm the pattern of dying, death and decay, which gives way to and
which makes possible new life and new growth.
If Jesus hadn’t gone through the suffering and
death that He did, we might regard Him today as having been a spectacular figure
in human history. But His very public death leads directly to his rising again
on Easter Sunday morning. In the connection of these two events, death and new
life, are revealed the truth that He holds the keys to life itself, for it is
our Lord who demonstrates that He has power, even over death.
Our walk with God involves dying, death and new
life. That walk often begins at our baptisms, by which we are buried with
Christ in a death like His, so that we might rise to a new life in a
resurrection like His. Here I am drawing on St. Paul’s explanation of the
meaning of baptism as we find it in Romans 6: 3 – 9.
That process, begun at baptism, continues
throughout our earthly journey. Things within us need to die. They need to die
in order that God can cultivate new growth within us.
The first Bishop I served under put this truth in a
very succinct way. He said, “Every one of us has a place in our hearts that
we’ve made off-limits to God.” But it is in that very off-limits place we’ve
created that God’s Holy Spirit would most like to enter into, in order to kill
off within us those things that are less than godly, less than holy. You and I
hold the keys to that off-limits place. Only we can unlock the door, and allow
God to rid us of those things that must die away. The result will inevitably be
new and much better growth.
What an apt Lenten message!
AMEN.
