The seed that dies is the one that bears fruit. That’s what Jesus said in John 12,
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.
John 12.24
A biologist might take issue with us saying a seed has to die before it grows, but they shouldn’t. That’s exactly what happens. It we take a seed and bury it in the earth, something that was once part of a living plant and is now pushed under the earth, what are we to call this but death? Quibbling here is, I think, a symptom of a brain that doesn’t read enough poetry. We could call it a kind of ‘modernist madness’ where everything is defined in the precise mechanistic categories of the natural sciences.
A grain of wheat—a seed—must fall into the earth and die. If it doesn’t it remains alone. If it does it bears fruit, it multiplies. In other words, when we look at the natural world, we learn a principle of the cosmos: things that keep on living die, things that die will live in multiplied life. That one seed grows into a plant that is full of seeds. If those seeds are planted, even if only a quarter of them grow as in Jesus’ parable of the soils (Matthew 13—often called the Sower, but it’s the Soils and the Seed that are in view), the number of seeds grows exponentially. It doesn’t take that long to go from one apple to an orchard, or from an orchard to a world dominated by apple trees, but each step requires the death of that seed.
Jesus was, of course, talking about himself. The seed (think Genesis 3) that dies bears much fruit. After death comes life, if you can be brave enough to submit to it. Jesus continued:
Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
John 12.25
We have to be willing to lose our lives in order to gain them. Not just in martyrdom, which seems an unlikely prospect in the west. Perhaps in prison, but much more likely in the daily choices to place another person before yourself, to not make a choice that you know is sinful despite wanting it, or in the ordinary practices of hospitality.
This principle—die to live—is a fundamental one in the cosmos. It’s written into the fabric of everything you encounter. It’s the narrative shape and pattern of the scriptures once you start to look for it. In the very simplest sense, the Bible has two shapes: “down and up again” and “there and back again.” Look closely and you’ll notice they are the same thing twisted 90 degrees. If every sentence in the Bible is a chiasm as well as significant larger chunks, whole books, and the Torah (they are), then we should notice that chiasms are shaped like exile and exodus (“there and back again”), like death and resurrection (“down and up again”), like a seed that dies and then sprouts into life.
I’m a firm believer that hospitality is the core of Christian life. God invites us to a table each week to feed us and so we learn to do the same for others. Christianity is commensal. This is, loosely, the topic of my thesis, so I won’t overwork the point. Hospitality requires death. I suspect we rarely think of that when gathered around a table laden with steaming rice and a vat of chilli, but much death has happened.
We start with the obvious: the food is now dead. All eating requires something to die for us to be fed. That’s a thought laden with gospel promise. For the beans and beef to grow required seeds to fall into the ground to grow the plant the beans grew on and the plants the cow ate. The same for the rice and the corn that made the tortilla chips (why isn’t there an English name for those?).
But there’s more death too. Those who opened their home to those that make their table full have had to deny themselves in several ways to make the food and gather a dozen or more to eat their labours. This is a kind of death, one done with joy—who wants to eat at the table of the people who begrudge your presence?—but a death nonetheless. Even more so when we consider that Christian hospitality is often offered to those who are ungrateful or do not respond to our open tables in any way: again, bitterness is unbecoming, but there is a cost to opening homes and tables to others inside and outside the church. Loving the stranger, which is the literal meaning of ‘hospitality’ in Greek, requires death.
Of course, then we get fruit that can feed the world.
None of this should surprise us. Everything worth having requires death. We die in order to bear fruit. Not every seed sprouts. That’s just the way of the field.
Except, we’re a resurrection people. We know that everything, everything, that dies in Christ comes to life. That includes all that ‘wasted’ effort on self-denial that didn’t bear fruit we could see. We need new creation eyes to learn that nothing done for God is wasted, no seed dies without bearing fruit, even if it isn’t the fruit that we were aiming for.
One day, perhaps soon, perhaps in the age to come, there will be a harvest. And the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Photo by Zura Narimanishvili on Unsplash
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