Image: Into the Seed © Jan Richardson
Reading from the Gospels, Lent 5, Year B: John 12.20-33
So do you remember that kerfuffle back in the 90s when Mattel brought out a new Barbie doll called Teen Speak Barbie? The Barbies were programmed to say what the company considered typical adolescent girl phrases. Some of the dolls were heard to utter, “Math class is tough!” A protest ensued, and Mattel excised that phrase. The story still circulates, with the troublesome phrase often (mis)quoted as “Math is hard!”
At this point in the Lenten journey, I find myself getting in touch with my Inner Barbie. Call her Ecclesiastical Barbie, perhaps, or Exegetical Barbie. (Ooooh, can’t you see her now, complete with the Barbie Dream Church and Deacon Ken?) These days, when someone pulls the string on my Inner Barbie, she’s likely to say, “Lent is tough!” or “These lections are hard!”
The scripture passages that this season presents to us are intense, dense, and complex. They are laden with metaphor and meaning, swirl with constellations of symbols and images, and shimmer with vivid emotion and crucial teaching. These texts challenge us to look with honesty at our lives, they confront us with our attachments, and—in a phrase I recently encountered—they urge us to sit with our own mirrors.
Lent is not for sissies.
In these past few weeks, we have traveled with Jesus into the wilderness, listened to his challenge to discern between the things of heaven and the things of earth, witnessed his outraged and outrageous cleansing of the temple, and overheard him liken himself to the serpent that Moses raised in the wilderness. Now he comes along, in this week’s gospel reading, speaking of grain and dying, losing one’s life and keeping it, hating and loving. We hear a thundering voice from heaven speaking of glory, and Jesus talking of being raised up from the earth.
The import of these Lenten texts is all the more intense for the surety of Jesus’ violent death that looms ahead. As we walk with Jesus through these weeks, we know what we are walking toward. And so his words carry extra weight, and we bend closer to capture them, as we do with someone we know is not long for this world—but who is already beginning to see things we cannot see, and speaking a language we do not yet understand.
Unlike others loosing the tethers that have held them to this life, however, Jesus retains a passionate interest in this world. Despite any impression he may give to the contrary (“those who hate their life in this world will keep it,” he says this week), Jesus does not perceive this world, this life, merely as a prelude to heaven or as a stockyard for weeding out the blessed from the damned. He seeks, rather, to train our eyes to perceive the kingdom of heaven tucked into the midst of this very world.
Teaching us to see the kingdom requires symbol, myth, metaphor, story. It requires the visual poetry that Jesus repeatedly uses as he turns to the things of earth to describe the things of heaven: yeast, seeds, dirt, water, fish, lilies of the field, birds of the air. Again and again he employs the ephemeral as he seeks to explain what is eternal. His doing so both comforts and unsettles; taking what is familiar to us, he turns it on its head, and us as well. How will we ever come to understand such a language?
We may feel daunted at this point in the season. I do. So suffused with meaning and messages, not to mention impending murder, these passages can overwhelm with their density and intensity and with their challenge to us to hold their paradoxes and untangle their meanings. Their lines somehow intertwine with the stuff of my days, drawing me deeper into the questions they pose about what my life is really about. There is so much to discern, to sort through, to sift.
In the midst of feeling daunted, I find myself thinking of the mystic poet who asked, “What is the cure for love? More love.” The formula holds true elsewhere. The cure for mystery? More mystery. The cure for paradox? More paradox. Last week’s readings from Numbers and the gospel of John reminded us that the cure for snakebite lay in looking upon a serpent. And in such a way this season beckons us to consider that we find our cure not by shrinking from what besets and befuddles and daunts us but by looking deeper into those very places, and finding the treasure that God has placed within them.
Go into the things you shrink from, Jesus tells his hearers—and us—in this passage. Go into the questions, the mysteries, the paradoxes, the seeming contradictions. Go into the Lenten dying that is not dying after all. We work so very hard at letting go, sometimes, trying to train ourselves to release our grip on all that is not God. But what if it is not about giving up but giving in? Falling into dirt, as Jesus says here. Going where grain is supposed to go. Following the spiral within the seed that takes us deeper into the dark but also—finally, fruitfully—out of it.
The lectionary interrupts this passage before its end; Jesus’ conversation with the crowd actually extends to verse 36. After Jesus finishes his discourse, here’s what John tells us Jesus did: he hid from them. And perhaps that’s what Jesus means for us to do at this point on the Lenten path: to hide. To not be set on figuring everything out but rather to let at least some part of ourselves, for some space of time, withdraw. To cease from wrestling with the questions and mysteries and simply rest with them and give in to them. To secret our souls like a seed in the earth. To see what grows.
How is it with your soul at this point on the Lenten path? As you work with these texts, how are these texts working on you? What questions have they stirred for you in these days? How do you respond to the mysteries and paradoxes they hold? Can you rest with those questions and mysteries? What do you need?
May you fall into, rest into, a place that will tend and nourish you in these days. Blessings.
Resources for the Season: Looking toward Lent
P.S. Happy Eve of the Feast of the Annunciation! Falling on March 25, this feast celebrates the radical yes that Mary said to Gabriel when the angel beckoned her to become the mother of Christ. For some of my artwork and reflections on the Annunciation, visit Getting the Message and The Hour of Matins: Annunciation.
[To use the image “Into the Seed,” please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]
March 24, 2009 at 5:40 PM |
“Lent is not for sissies.”
I love it. Wonderful post.
March 27, 2009 at 11:35 AM |
Thanks for your words and for stopping by!
March 24, 2009 at 7:32 PM |
Hmmm….I wrote some thoughts about attachment not three hours ago, and before that had the opportunity to feast on a poem by Pablo Neruda, Keeping Quiet: a bit of it goes like this –
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any languages;
let’s stop for one second.
and not move our arms so much…..
Jan, this is a magnificently pointed post; thank you,
and again, Hmmm….where’s my mirror??
March 27, 2009 at 11:25 AM |
Ooooohhh, Carolyn, thanks so much for this Pablo Neruda poem and for your own words. Had not encountered that particular Neruda poem before—it’s quite wonderful. A good word for me in this season. Thank you.
March 25, 2009 at 6:40 AM |
I have reached the point in Lent where I grow weary of the self-sufficient, not-really-human Jesus to be found in the gospel of John (which I abandoned for two Sundays, preaching instead of texts from Mark that we won’t otherwise see this year).
But this lection lures me back (the first part, anyway, the part about the seed). I can envision a sermon that takes this little parable and runs with it, anticipating Palm/ Passion Sunday.
Thank you for these reflections. They are so, so wise and stirring.
March 27, 2009 at 11:39 AM |
Thanks, Magdalene. I am often surprised by where a lection will take me—where it will lure me, to borrow your word—if I sit with it long enough…how a seemingly small thing—a seed, say—will open a direction, a path, a world.
Thank you for your words, and blessings to you as you continue to find words in your preaching and elsewhere on this Lenten road.
March 25, 2009 at 8:47 AM |
I was really struck by your phrase “again and again he employs the ephemeral … to explain the eternal”. I hadn’t thought of it like this before. It seems to me comforting, in some way saying that the most ephemeral of things will somehow be with us always. Perhaps in a thought or a memory, but real nonetheless, and so we don’t need to cling.
March 27, 2009 at 11:51 AM |
Thank you, Tess. Amen to what you said about the ephemeral somehow being with us always, and that being comforting—I appreciate how you put that. Years ago, I came across a poem by the Uruguayan poet Maria Eugenia Baz Ferreira that began to subtly shift how I think about the ephemeral; she writes, in part, “To all that is brief and fragile/superficial, unstable/To all that lacks foundation/argument or principles;/To all that is light,/fleeting, changing, finite/To smoke spirals,/wand roses,/To sea foam/and mists of oblivion…./To all that is light in weight/for itinerants/on this transient earth/Somber, raving,/with transitory words/and vaporous bubbly wines/I toast/in breakable glasses…” (From Earth Prayers by Roberts & Amidon.)
Cheers!
March 14, 2018 at 6:14 PM |
Lovely poem, Jan, and the whole post with its links is lovely too. Thank you. Ferreira’s poem put me in mind a little of this Gerard Manley Hopkins poem – especially: “…all things counter, original, spare, strange…”
“Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
“Pied Beauty”
Gerard Manley Hopkins
written 1877
March 29, 2018 at 1:56 PM |
Brian, thank you for this! I’m grateful for your words, and those you’ve shared from Gerard Manley Hopkins. I’m circling back to them in this Holy Week, and they ring with a particular grace in these days. Many blessings to you as Easter draws near.
March 25, 2009 at 11:29 PM |
You ask – “How is it with your soul at this point on the Lenten path?” My soul is surprised again and again. The more I attempt to stick to the path, the more surprises appear and lure me onward. Everyday symbols are full of the season, the mystery, the why of it all. Thanks for your post – my soul is awakened on this journey.
March 27, 2009 at 11:40 AM |
Thank you, Sunrise Sister! It’s always a gift to receive your words. May your path continue to be seeded with good surprises!
March 26, 2009 at 11:50 AM |
A serious post asking serious questions, but all I could think of was the “practice chapel” at seminary that we called “The Barbie Doll Practice Chapel” because it was tiny, filled with all sorts of liturgical costumes, and included baby dolls for practice baptisms. So I guess my challenge is to read this post again and get serious this time.
CP
March 27, 2009 at 11:32 AM |
Ha! Thanks for sharing this, Country Parson!
And I think it’s best, in this season, not to get TOO serious, anyway—I mean, Lent presents us with intensely serious stuff, but we need to be mindful of not letting it overwhelm us. Think that’s part of why the Sundays in Lent aren’t counted as being part of the forty days of this season—as in the rest of the year, they are like “little Easters,” as Don Saliers, et al, say in Handbook of the Christian Year. A cause for celebration in the midst of a challenging journey.
I will carry that image of The Barbie Doll Practice Chapel—thanks!
March 27, 2009 at 9:33 AM |
Could not have been a more timely entry for me–a reminder that trials and pain must be traveled through, not around. Thank you.
March 27, 2009 at 11:54 AM |
Thank you, Becca.
…though taking a detour around or a break from them for a little bit, where possible, can occasionally be helpful…sometimes we need to regather our energy in order to keep traveling.
Blessings to you.
March 27, 2009 at 4:12 PM |
I love your catch of that “He hid.” After the last four weeks and mid-week services I was happy to look up and find a baptism happening this Sunday. (Don’t ask why it couldn’t be saved until Easter.) It gave me a chance to hide in sermon prep, still in a mystery, but a more comfortable and joyous one.
March 17, 2018 at 4:13 PM |
Hi, I’m seeing this nine years after you originally posted it, but I want to thank you! We are on the same cycle now as in 2009, and I was looking for inspiration for the prayers I’m leading in church tomorrow. This post is very inspiring indeed! It has really helped me to think about the wheat metaphor. Thanks again, and best wishes for a happy Lenten season.