The readings this week are all about new life, the “life to the full’ that Jesus came to give and only he can give.
Life we can only enter into through surrender; another word for which is “dying.” That sounds pleasant, doesn’t it? But look at the alternatives.
Jesus knew his life would be fruitless if he didn’t die: “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat.” It remains alone, isolated. “But if it dies, it produces much fruit.”
If we don’t “die” by surrendering our self-sufficiency, our complacency in being “right” that closes us to the ideas of others, we remain alone, isolated. The truth we do have dies with us, unfertilized by the ideas of others; a pocket of truth zippered so tight it stales into sterility.
Parents who do not share their religious experience with their children cannot pass on their faith. Catholics who do not dialogue receptively with Protestants perpetuate the division. “Dialogue” begins with asking about another’s experience of God and sharing one’s own. Any discussion not based on a recognition of common experience is doomed to degenerate into nothing but argument. Teachers and preachers of the “Catholic faith” do damage if they don’t listen to the “catholic experience” of those who are living it on ground level and learn from what they hear. And all Christians stunt their growth if they just “hunker down” in the understanding of the faith they grew up with and do not continue to read Scripture and hear with openness what others read and find in it.
This was the sin of the Pharisees. Faced with Jesus, who had personal, intimate knowledge of the Father, they didn’t want to hear about him. They had laws to live by. That was enough for them. So they crucified Jesus, as their successors today crucify anyone who tries to open their minds to more truth.
The only true obedience is surrender to the “endless exploration” of the mystery that is God — and the mystery of sharing in the divine life of God by Baptism. Ultimately, there are only two choices: discipleship — which means commitment to learning the mind and heart of God — and Phariseeism, which means stiff-necked resistance to anything we don’t know already.
Paul said that Jesus himself “learned obedience from what he suffered.” That is, from what he surrendered to. We learn obedience by surrendering our minds to new insights into the truth of our faith, our wills to new ideals, new principles of action that follow from it, our hearts to higher levels of inspiration.
The only true sterility is spiritual fruitlessness. When we stop surrendering to the seed of truth, we begin to die: sterile and alone.
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