Last weekend, when we had our early glimpse of summer, I found myself drawn out into the back garden. I’m very grateful to those of you worked hard last year to help me transform that chaotic wilderness into an orderly garden for relaxation and for growing vegetables. And it was to this that my attention turned as I went down to Camden Garden Centre to buy seeds and flower pots and compost. I’m a bit new to all this, but not entirely new as I recalled those times in primary school when we would put runner bean seeds on blotting paper in jam jars, water them assiduously, and wait impatiently for them to grow. There was something wonderful about seeing that process, which normally goes on in secret, of the seed germinating and sending forth its shoots.
But today, we’re not at that point of germination. Today, Passion Sunday, Jesus is making us think about the grain of wheat that falls into the earth and dies. It has to do so, he tells us, if it’s going to bear any fruit in the future. And of course in these words he is preparing his disciples for the fact that he has to die and will be buried in the ground, and that this is necessary as part of God’s bigger plan for renewal and new life.
Jesus’ words must have been hard for his disciples and they are certainly hard for us today since our culture has made immediate and constant growth its singular preoccupation. The principle of growth is very much our society’s mythology. It has come to exist for its own sake, and some see its simple restoration as the way out of our current economic crisis. But the Archbishop of Canterbury has argued recently for a more considered view of growth:
“Growth out of poverty, growth towards a degree of intelligent control of one’s circumstances, growth towards maturity of perception and sympathy – all these are manifestly good and ethically serious goals, and… there are ways of conducting our economic business that could honour and promote these. A goal of growth simply as an indefinite expansion of purchasing power is either vacuous or malign – malign to the extent that it inevitably implies the diminution of the capacity of others in a world of limited resource.”
But I’m not just talking here just about economic growth; in all sorts of ways we value growth so much that we want to eliminate any kind of dying or decline. It’s obviously true in the way we present our bodies and in the wider medical battle against ageing. But it can be true in the way in which we think about our spiritual lives too. We want faith to be something that grows cumulatively with experiences in the spiritual bank when we could say “then I know I encountered God”, as if our doubts and crises of faith won’t then have the potential to wipe all that away and leave us in a frightening place of despair.
The Christian mind does need to think more imaginatively than along the linear plane of “growth for its own sake”. The Christian way of thinking is perhaps more one of cycles – cycles of dying and rising. And that involves a recognition that dying is part of rising, and a certain kind of decline is part of a good kind of growth.
The language of dying and rising is, of course, at the heart of baptism. In the waters of baptism we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. But we shouldn’t think of this dying and rising as a one-off event. This is the constant experience of the Christian life: the putting to death of the old in order for the new creation to be born. In that sense, the Way of the Cross, that we have depicted around this church at the moment, is neither simply an event that took place 2000 years ago nor is it just one aspect of the Christian story to be thought about for a couple of weeks each year. It is the way we are all walking, in different ways, all the time. “Whoever serves me must follow me” says Jesus, “and where I am, there will my servants be also.” That’s not likely, thank God, to be walking to a violent death like Jesus. It’s more about becoming aware of what needs to die within ourselves, what fantasies and idols and destructive cycles we need to allow to fall to the ground and die before fruitful growth can happen. But, goodness knows, that can be pretty painful process too.
It’s worth thinking about that in relation to the three areas of our world, our church life, and our own personal lives.
So firstly for our world, where all these issues are very live at the moment. As we saw in Rowan Williams’ words earlier, the endless pursuit of growth for some is inevitably going to mean a raw deal for others. The realisation of the catastrophic ecological problems caused by living like that in a world of finite resources has exposed the lie that unregulated free market growth is inevitably going to raise the developing world out of poverty. And what struck me at the rally I attended for Jobs, Justice and Climate in central London yesterday was that none of these things are going to become real for the poor of the world without some serious putting to death of the illusions about our needs and lifestyles in the northern hemisphere. What’s becoming more and more clear is that if the wealthy Christians of the world really want to help the poor, it is no longer just about writing cheques, it’s got to be about sacrifice. It’s got to be about dying with Christ in order that all people of the world might rise.
And secondly, in the church too we need to think about these cycles of dying and rising as we prayerfully search out our common life to see what has become stale and self-serving and even idolatrous. Then we need to find the courage to put those things to death in the knowledge that they are truly things which hold us back from new life in God. So often I have found that church life becomes very stultified around the issue of “change”. There are those whose temperament is suited to change and they want more of it and there are those whose temperament is hostile to change and they want to minimise it. But change for its own sake is not the issue. The real question is where a church community has become too caught up in its own illusions about itself and its own comfort with the habitual to open itself to God’s future. Every church needs to ask: What is the seed that needs to die to allow those new shoots to grow?
And thirdly, of course all of this comes down to ourselves and how readily we are prepared to embrace the Christian life of dying and rising, dying and rising, dying and rising. It seems to me that one of the primary purposes of prayer is to place ourselves before God, day by day, and face up to the difficult question: “What do I need to let go of? What needs to die within myself so that I can live for God, which means living fully as the person I’m meant to be?”
A wonderful text for reflection in Passiontide is Isaac Watts’ hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” which takes up this language of dying and dispossession within ourselves as we face the sacrifice of Christ. “Then am I dead to all the globe, and all the globe is dead to me”. All illusions about myself abandoned, all idols of self-importance, self-reliance and pride destroyed. “All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to his blood”.
This Christian vocation of dying and rising is not an easy task on our own. But the good news about it, the “glory” of it (to use a word from John’s Gospel) is that the more we do it the more we are drawn together to support one another in the task. The more a disparate people embrace the Way of the Cross, the more they become the Church. And I think that’s what Jesus means in his words “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself”. As we follow him Jesus gathers us together, to share one another’s burdens and collectively to put to death all that keeps us from embracing his love in one another. That’s what he does in this Eucharist as we proclaim Christ crucified on this altar, he draws us all in our differences and weaknesses, to himself to give us the gifts we need to live his risen life.
And it is from here, from the Eucharist where the risen Christ is made present, that we can look ahead two weeks to Easter when, once the seed has died in the ground, we will sing another hymn, “Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain, wheat that in the dark Earth many days had lain.”
If we have the courage to die to ourselves this Passiontide then love will come again as wheat that springeth green.