If a kernel of wheat dies (John 12:20-33)

The first thing always strikes me about this passage is: these Greeks have come to Jesus. Or to be exact they’ve come to Philip, who’s gone to Andrew, and together they’ve gone to Jesus.

Who then ignores the Greeks completely and just goes off on this tangent.

Is this because the Greeks have actually served their purpose? Jesus has gone out to the Children of Israel. Some have responded, some haven’t. And occasionally he’s met a Gentile - a non-Jew - and dealt with them – the Centurion whose servant he heals, or the Syro-Phoenician woman.

But this time there’s a delegation come to see him. Isaiah 60 says “all nations will come to your light”. And maybe Jesus sees this as the sign that his mission on earth is coming to an end – and the greater mission is come. And so immediately he’s talking about his death, and about how when you plant a seed, that seed “dies” in the ground, but many seeds will come from the resulting plant.

And so he knows he will be lifted up on the cross. But when he is, that means the Spirit can be poured out on all the disciples – from then until now – to share the Good News throughout the world. The seed will be sown – and many seeds will be produced. That first generation of Jesus’s disciples showed the recklessness that only those who know the most important thing on earth- and want to share it – can show.

And in being lifted up, Jesus also draws all people to himself. The word “lifted up” also means “exalted”. And it’s in Jesus’s crucifixion that he’s shown in glory. It’s in his death that he drives out the evil Prince of this world.

Being a gloomy soul, I like to spend a lot of time in churchyards. Apart from anything else, wearing my big archdruidical cloak, you can terrify the unwary around sundown. And it’s not the big old tombs to important people that move me. They've maybe had their reward. It’s the graves of young children. It’s the military graves, people dying in their 20s and 30s and 40s to protect our country. The young women lost before they achieve their dreams. And I think of all that sadness, their lost potential for love and achievement, not living to see dreams  come to fulfilment or their children grow. I think of all those young people lost in the AIDS pandemic, of my friend Sally, so full of life and interest in everyone else that she drove us up the wall quite frequently -  taken so suddenly in the Covid pandemic.

And then I consider the Son of God, crucified for me, just in his early 30s. The grief of his mother. The dashed dreams of his disciples. All the teaching and preaching he could have done – all the love he would have shared given another 40 or 50 years of ministry.

In all our broken dreams and lost potential, and all our sadnesses, and in every might-have-been that never will be – God is with us.

And yet because a seed has been sown, it will grow to new life. At the point of death, beyond the point of hope, in the grave, God is with us there too. Calling us all to him. Calling us to share in the glorious land beyond all our dreams, where we are truly ourselves and can worship the King face to face and know as we are known and love as we are loved.

And it’s only through a cross that we can be saved, and only through the grave that we can be raised, and only when a seed dies that it will grow to new and abundant life.

So we trust in the one who was exalted on a cross and follow the one who gave up his life, that we might all share in it.