Dying thus around us every day

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Today's gospel (John 12: 24-26) evokes a gospel paradox that is easy to say and impossible (without His grace) to live by: that death is the condition of life. 

We do not believe it. The confidence of our belief in the desirable life of the grain cannot be overstated. And yet it fails Jesus' test for life: that anyone who loves his life will lose it.

This is not the cosy Jesus, beloved of the balloon-and-banjo liturgists. But it is the Jesus of the gospel. What's more, it is the Jesus of the call to the fulness of life and love, a call that our COLW charism reminds us of constantly. 

So, in this light the gospel yields up more paradoxes. Death is the condition of life, and keeping our lives for eternity requires us to hate them in this world. Is this hyperbole, or is Jesus merely another extremist who has not understood the supreme power of self-interest?

The question would be blasphemous if it wasn't rhetorical. Jesus came to give life. Indeed, He is the life He came to give. But He gives it only at the cost of the death of the power of self-interest. Two loves have built two cities, says St Augustine. We need to choose.

And, yes, of course His language is beset with rabbinical hyperbole. He does not mean that we should hate our lives which are His gift but rather hate everything in them that blocks our union with Him. But the end result is no hyperbole.  The rich harvest which awaits the death of self-interest is precisely the life and love we are called to live in this world and into eternity.  

Yet there remains the in-between moment; the time when the grain is dying; the moment when we must distinguish what to hate and what not to hate in our lives; the careful discernment of exactly which limb to offer the executioner first. 

It is possible that as St Lawrence lay smouldering on his gridiron, he threw back his head, smiled, and said: "This is the life."  But between such moments, when his whole being was taken in the power of the gifts of the Holy Spirit - the same gifts we possess but do not direct - Lawrence had the chance to observe his own powerlessness, his fragility before the pain, to recall his past failings, and to feel his utterly human panic, the firing of the fight-or-flight instinct, at the approaching nemesis. Then, perhaps, he would have remembered these words of Jesus: "If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too."

Which should be a comfort (and yet we never think of it). In the depths of our suffering - whether from without or from within - Jesus has always been there first as a pioneer, a path finder before we even knew we were walking the path, to work His miracle of reborn life. "Does He know what I suffer?" we might ask. To which He surely answers: "I walked that path first and, wherever I am, my servant must be there too."

If the grain dies, it yields a rich harvest. Let it be done unto us, according to His word.