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The first reading from the prophet Jeremiah is one of the most beautiful scripture passages in the Bible. Jeremiah proclaims, that God will make a new covenant with his people; this new covenant will be within, it will be upon our hearts, it will be so profound; there will be no need to teach friends or relatives how to know the Lord.
A covenant is a contract between two unequal parties, freely entered into, binding forever, and sealed in blood. The blood symbolized a threat: the covenant parties walked between the two halves of the animals, as if to say, “If I don’t keep my word, may I be cut in two as these animals are.”
But we have a new covenant. What Jeremiah longed for has taken place. No longer is the covenant, blood of animals; it is the blood of Jesus himself! He offers himself in sacrifice.
Jesus proclaims that “now is the hour”! This is the hour for the inclusion and salvation of all peoples. It is the hour when He will enact a new covenant. It is the hour when He will become the sacrificial victim for the sins of all peoples.
The terms of the old covenant were written on tablets of stone: the conditions of the new agreement are to be written on our hearts. We are to follow Jesus. We are to be one with him. We are to give our lives in union with him.
The glorification of Christ comes by his total self-giving. There can be no resurrection without sacrificial death. The seed must fall to the ground and die before it burst forth in life.
What does it mean for a grain of wheat to die, in order for it to produce much fruit? Jesus’ audience for His analogy was most likely given to farmers, they would have understood its meaning. For those of us who are not farmers perhaps we can replace the seed of wheat with the seed of a flower, to help us better understand what Jesus is saying. Have you ever examined the center of a flower? From a distance you see the beauty wonder and awe of this colorful integral and sometimes amazing living plant. And when you move closer to the plant and start to look it over, you begin to see all these seeds in the center of this one flower. A Sunflower would be an excellent example of what I’m talking about.
For those who planted Marigold seeds in your religious education class. If you check them-out after they blossom you will see hundreds of tiny seeds in the heart of the flower.
We all know that every flower doesn’t last forever. It must die, before it can produce all those seeds, which hopefully will become flowers. We know this because we have witnessed it. Imagine seeing a flower for the first time, and watching the bloom whither and die. One could very easily think that this is the end of the flower. Its pretty amazing that one flowers’ dying can bring into being so many flowers.
In a special way Jesus is asking us to be much like a flower. Beautiful and radiant, freely giving our seeds, that we may surrender to an abundance of flowers, a world of flowers, a world of love, peace and justice.
Before this can take place part of us need to learn how to die. Living is about dying.
If we never learn how to die, we will never really live. In order to really be alive we need to die to the many things, which prevent us from real life.
We need to die to pettiness, to the belief that we are the center of the universe. We need to die to fear, fear that someone else is better then us or has more then us. We need to die to anger, seek to understand and not be understood. We need to die to Laziness, neglecting what we ought or should do. We need to die to greed, to the love of money or possessions rather than people. We need to die to excess, to excessive eating and drinking. We need to die to lust, to the tendency to divorce sex from marriage: or to treat another as a sex object.
Jesus asks that His fundamental teachings not only become a way of life, He is saying they need to become spontaneous actions that flow from one’s heart. These actions are the seeds of life.
So when we come to the tough acts of life, to the cross roads where difficult decisions need to be made, where sacrifice and suffering come into play, just remember, that, if it is for the glory of God it is also for the glory of one’s self. Sacrificing, suffering, and dying, may at times seem to be the end, but in fact they may very well be the beginning of an abundance of flowers and life everlasting.