The Kernel of Wheat

This text lives from its contrasts:
To lose ones life or to keep it, beginning and end, seeding and harvest, grief and hope.
It is true in regards to Jesus’ suffering, and Jesus said that it must be so. I must suffer. That is the only way the new will come. And he uses the example of the kernel of wheat, which falls to the ground and dies.
Dying – a terrible and finite word. Everybody must die. But hope also dies – admittedly - as the saying goes – last, but yet again and again -The hope of life, the hope of peace, the hope of reconciliation, and the hope of future. Jesus doesn’t keep it a secret. He says it is so, but only through death new life can grow and bring fruit, like the kernel of wheat.
Wheat. Fruit of the earth; Fruit of sun and rain; Fruit of hope. Seeded in spring in the hope that it might produce fruit – year after year.
Jesus says, “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed; but if it dies, it will produce many seeds”. That is an invitation for us Christians who follow Jesus. Even when our hopes die – again and again, yet there is hope in seeding – to lay into the ground - that it may bear fruit.
Jesus says whoever follows me can’t give up hope. To follow me means there is hope in the future, even when all signs speak against it. And there will be loss and grief and war and destruction but when the kernel is laid into the earth and dies it will bear much fruit. It is a firm and consoling promise that Jesus is giving us here. Jesus is certain. He doesn’t say 'maybe' or 'it could be', but he says, “It produces new seeds”. Jesus invites us; he calls us to seed hope into the world – there where we live.
As Jesus’ followers we can, no we shall look where we can seed hope – small amounts and big – and then watch what will become of it. That won’t be in our hands anymore, but Jesus promises that Its death will produce many new seeds—thirtyfold, sixtyfold or hundredfold...

Joseph Backhaus