From Death to New Life

Jane Korvemaker offers a visual explanation of a parable Jesus used to tell His followers about death and new life.

The joy of the Risen Christ is upon us – happy Octave of Easter! The Triduum has been an experience of suffering, sorrow, grief, and unexpected joy. In a very real way this is a summary of many of life’s experiences. If you’ve experienced the death of a loved one over the past year (or any type of major grief or trauma) and this is your first Easter without them, Easter joy will be mingled with pangs of grief and sorrow, showing up perhaps unexpectedly. There is room for sorrow and sadness even amidst Easter. Sorrow and sadness do not negate hope (nor times of joy); they speak to the real struggle between our experiences here and our future hope.

In fact, the struggle is an essential part of that journey. There’s a one-line parable in the Gospel of John that helps illustrate this point:

"Amen, amen, I say to you, 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)

This parable gains a richer meaning if we use our ability to observe. I cannot provide you with wheat seeds at different stages of growth, as I do in my church program for children to dig up and observe, but I am germinating a few different types and have a few pictures.

20210406 JKorvemaker stages of growth of seedlings

Take a look at the photos. Focus on what is needed for the plant to transform from one stage into the next.

There is room for sorrow and sadness even amidst Easter. #catholicmom

To germinate seeds, the seed shell must become softened first. In the first stage it is still rather hard, but as the seed grows and transforms, the shell becomes softer in order for the life within it to be able to break through the shell and grow. The shell is needed to protect, but as it honours the formation of the plant, it necessarily transforms itself in order to facilitate the new life. It becomes softer, it breaks down as it gives its strength and all it has to the new life in order for it to grow strong.

Let’s juxtapose these observations with what St. Paul tells his audience in his second letter to the Corinthians:

Always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being given up to death for the sake of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2 Corinthians 4:10-12)

I wonder what we can now say Jesus is telling His disciples about death and new life? Does our observation of some stages of seed germination and seeing how St. Paul understood the Christian life give new insight to this parable?

"Amen, amen, I say to you, 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)

seedling in flowerpot