Unless a Grain of Wheat
by Anne Le Bas

As most of you must know by now, I’m sure, I am a mad keen gardener. At this
time of year, the vicarage windowsills are crammed with little pots of
seedlings…

But I understand that not everyone shares my passion, and for some gardening
can seem a very mysterious activity, full of strange terms. Pruning and
pinching out, perennials and biennials and half-hardy annuals, and all those
Latin names…where do you start?

There are some basic bits of gardening advice though, which seem to me to be
pretty obvious, but which make a real difference between your chances of
success or failure. The one I know I always need to hear is this… “Seeds
won’t grow unless you take them out of the packet…”

Every year in the depths of winter, I pore over the seed catalogues and
order what I think I’ll need for the coming year. Come the spring I have all
manner of seeds in their packets waiting to be sown. But there are always
one or two of those packets which stay unopened. Somehow, I overlook them –
perhaps they look trickier than I expected, or they need some very specific
conditions, or I meant to get around to sowing them, but forgot or was too
busy. And so they sit there, and sure enough, they don’t grow into the
glorious plants they are meant to; they don’t grow into anything at all in
fact. I could probably stock an entire garden with the things I have failed
to sow over the years.  “Seeds won’t grow unless you take them out of the
packet.” 

Jesus knew this too. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,
it remains just a single grain:” he says. It was as obvious then as it is
now, but probably just as important to hear. If you want your grain of wheat
to sprout and grow and produce a harvest, you have got to be prepared to let
it go, to drop it into the earth first. And what will happen to it there? It
will disintegrate, break open, become lost in the mud. There will be nothing
to see of the seed anymore. But in its place will be a new plant, bearing
many more seeds than the original. Of course, the slugs might get it, or the
birds, or some disease or other – there’s always a risk involved – but if
you never sow it, you can be sure that it won’t come to anything. 

Jesus isn’t really handing out horticultural advice here, of course. He’s
talking about himself and his own death. This is a message directed in
particular at some people who had sought him out to find out more about him.
We’re told they are Greeks. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were from
Greece, or were ethnically Greek. Greek ways of life had spread all around
the Mediterranean and the Middle East during the time of Alexander the
Great. Greek was the international language. Greek literature and philosophy
were the backdrop to the lives of any reasonably educated person. The Jews
in Palestine had fought hard to keep their own culture and religion pure
from these influences, but Jews living elsewhere, as well as Gentiles, were
often Greek in their outlook. The Greeks we meet here probably come from
this “Hellenistic” background as it was called. Their Judaism is
“Greek-flavoured Judaism”. It’s no accident that they come first to Philip
and Andrew – disciples with Greek names, not Hebrew names.

So what are these “Greeks” expecting to hear from Jesus? To understand that
we need to know a little bit about Greek philosophy. "Greek philosophers had
some very definite ideas about what it meant to be divine – what divinity
looked like. Ordinary Greek men and women might still have believed in the
colourful legends of the multitude ancient gods and goddesses with all their
dubious goings-on, but Greek philosophers by this time thought of those
stories as just that – stories. For them God was quite different. God’s most
important attribute, the essence of divinity, was that he never changed. 
Human beings changed and eventually died: God didn’t – if he did, he
couldn’t be God as far as they were concerned. God wasn’t tossed about by
passions, subject to the ups and downs of life. He was an unseen essence who
went serenely on, just the same, for eternity, absolute perfection. If you
wanted to be like God, which they did, then you had to aim for perfection
too – physical and mental as well as moral. 

Jesus warns them here, though, that his life won’t be like that at all. He
is about to be thrown into a maelstrom of suffering. At the end of it, he
will die, his mission will end in what will look like absolute failure, not
absolute perfection. They want to hear of a Messiah who will rise above the
storms of the world, with a calm, cool divine mastery. But he tells them
that he’s going to fall into the mud, like a seed, and be broken to pieces.
It has to be this way, he says, because it is the only way that will lead to
life in the end. In one of his letters, St Paul says in one of his letters
that the cross is “folly to the Greeks” . We don’t hear how these Greeks
respond, but we can guess that it didn’t make a lot of sense to them. This
wasn’t their idea of the divine way.  

It’s probably hard for us to understand how shocked and baffled people like
this would have been by the imagery Jesus uses here – the seed
disintegrating and dying. We’ve had 2000 years to get used to the story of
Jesus’ death – but the legacy of that Greek way of thinking is still with us
in other ways. We often burden ourselves - or others – with unrealistic
expectations of perfection. To be truly successful, everything in our lives
has to be right. Good job, good marriage, good home, 2.4 smiling children…
When any one of those things doesn’t work out as we expect we beat ourselves
up,  or beat someone else up, convinced that it ought not to be so, that
something can be done and must be done to make it all better. If we can’t
manage that we simply paper over the cracks and pretend all is still well
and hope no one notices that we are falling apart. 

Sometimes we can become so scared of failing that we won’t try anything that
feels risky at all, and we end up missing out on opportunities that might
have borne good fruit. We cling anxiously to the one grain of wheat we have,
and we miss what might grow from it. The truth is though, as many who have
gone through times of apparent failure will tell you, that it is often in
those times that they learn the really valuable, life-changing lessons they
need. It’s at these time we discover the generous love of God, and of
others, which doesn’t depend on what we can do or give, but only on our
preparedness to accept that love. It’s at these times that we discover what
really matters to us, and how easily we are sucked into chasing after things
that don’t. Rudyard Kipling in his famous poem “If” said that we should meet
“with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”.
Neither is quite what we often think they are. Triumph may not make us
happier or better people, and disaster can be a rich seedbed of new life. 

“Should I ask, Father same me from this hour ?”asked Jesus. But he knows
that it is this hour – the hour of his death – which is the moment that will
really matter. If he turns back now he will be turning back from his message
too, a message of love, forgiveness that includes everyone. He’ll be saying
that it never really mattered. The grain of wheat - his life - must fall
into the ground at Golgotha, if that message is to survive and spread. 

The seed that you were given today when you came into church isn’t a grain
of wheat. It’s a runner bean seed. It’s a beautiful seed. That lovely black
and purple speckled coat, shiny and smooth. It looks great. You could put it
on a shelf and admire it. You could, I suppose cook it and eat it, but it
wouldn’t make much of a meal. Or you could plant it in a pot on the
windowsill (it’s too cold yet to plant it outside) and who knows, later in
the year you might be harvesting runner beans from it. If you haven’t got a
garden, you could team up with someone who has? I can’t guarantee you
success – slugs, birds, late frosts, all sorts of dangers might lie in its
way – but if you don’t sow it there’s no chance at all it will grow. 

Whatever you do with it I hope it will remind you of what Jesus said in
today’s Gospel – not so much about horticulture but about life. Imagine that
this seed represents something in your life. Perhaps it is something you
know you have always wanted to do, but have been afraid to try. Perhaps it
is something you feel you ought to do – something that needs sorting out or
addressing in your life, something that feels difficult, risky or painful.
Perhaps it represents a gift you have to give – here or elsewhere – a gift
that is needed. We can certainly do with all the help we can get; that’s
something I’ve emphasized in our Annual report and I’ll say it again at the
Annual meeting after this service. We are growing, but to keep growing we
need people to have the courage to have a go, to get involved, to deepen
their faith, take on new responsibilities, to reach out to others and
welcome them. Are we up to it? No. Of course not. One little seed – what can
that come to? But the one seed of Jesus’ life changed the world, so maybe
ours are more important and more powerful than we think.  

Seeds won’t grow unless we take them out of the packet. It’s basic, but it’s
true – so whatever our runner bean seed represents to each of us, let’s pray
that we have the courage to let it fall into the ground, and the faith to
believe that God will bring life, hope and joy from it, however timidly it
is given. Amen.

(Comments to Anne at annelebas@DSL.PIPEX.COM.)