On dying .... and rising

Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,

it remains just a grain of wheat;

but if it dies, it produces much fruit.

John 12:24

Young Maple, a toy poodle, joined our household on the weekend. Hailing from St Marys, Maple endured the journey to our home, smitten with her new ‘mother’ – our daughter. Maple was brought into life in a large human family, fellow siblings and a new family of rag doll kittens. Well-handled, compliant and genuinely cute, Maple will never return, will never see her family again. As a human, her story would be tragic; as a dog, however, she will soon forget and know only the family that now loves and treasures her. One part of her life dies, and another is born again.

We are all quite familiar with the manner in which nature renews itself. A process of dying and rising, a language of growth that is both secular and religious, singular and communal, personal and social. The pattern is reproduced in every sphere of our lives. Death gives way to life. Little wonder the Christian sees the transition from death to life as following a natural order.

In John we see Jesus predicting his glorification – and acknowledging that in order for this to happen he must first die.

We can talk about metaphor, analogy, simile, allegory – yet each of these cannot describe the reality about which Jesus was speaking. And further, that we who believe are invited into this reality, again by dying to self, are also called to life. In the first instance that life is like Maple’s: a dying to our past, and awakening to a new way of living; in the second, it is the physical extinguishment of life that leads irrevocably and irretrievably into a new state of being – eternal life, after life, heaven.

The language we need to express this transformation has been lost to so many of us, we avoid ‘death’, ‘dying’, ‘dead’ – we humans pass away, pass over or just pass and are subsequently no longer with us, deceased. For many death is a permanent state of nothingness, assuaged by ‘never forgetting’ or being ‘in our hearts forever’. Our faith, our knowledge, means nothing if that is where our understanding ends.

As Lent creeps towards Easter, we are firmly reminded, Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life (John 12:25).