Fifth Sunday of Lent – Fr. Barko
Jn 12:20-33
March 17, 2024

Who are the people who have led you to your relationship with Jesus?

If the Greeks who had asked to see Jesus felt they had bitten off more than they could chew after everything that happened, I don’t blame them.

Perhaps they had heard of Jesus’ miracles or teachings and were curious, wanting to lay eyes on the man they had heard so much about.

They are to find Jesus, of course, in the grain of wheat fallen to earth and dying. They are to find Jesus in the one who is lifted up from the earth and loses his life.

Imagine their surprise when he issued such sobering and challenging dictums as, “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.”

If we should like to see Jesus, we know that we need to look for the fallen grains of wheat around us, the sick and impoverished, the abused and oppressed.

If we should like to see Jesus, we know that we need to look for those who are losing their lives, the victims of poverty, abuse, discrimination, and war.

No wonder some of those Greeks tried to shake off the voice from heaven as thunder: it affirmed the authority of Jesus’ words. Frightening. Sobering.

Even those willing to say the voice was from an angel still fell short of acknowledging the truth.
Maybe it was too inconvenient to believe that God’s voice had spoken from heaven because that would force them to grapple more seriously with the difficult things Jesus had said.

Has there been a time when you were struggling with your faith, either in Jesus as the Christ, or to continue your association with the Church? What was that period like? What do you remember about that time in your life?

I know there are times when I hear the Word of God or receive Jesus in the Holy Eucharist and fail to respond appropriately.

It’s easy to brush aside God giving himself to me much as the crowd brushed aside the voice as thunder—nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to cause me to change how I live my life.

At other times, I recognize that the Lord is present to me but fail to actually respond to his presence.

I may acknowledge the Holy One during mass, then let my mind drift to my to-do list for that day.

This gospel challenges us not to take these encounters with the Lord for granted, but to ask him to help us draw closer to him and to allow him to change our lives.

There was a time in my live when I had to mentor graduate students. These were highly gifted, extremely motivated people, and it wasn’t hard to see where they could be in ten years if they stuck with it.

On the other hand, they were virtually blind when it came to imagining their future selves. They already knew who they were, thank you very much.

Some saw themselves as much better writers than they could possibly have been at that point in the journey. Others were convinced that, no matter how hard they tried, they were doomed to failure.

My primary job as a mentor was to help them topple these false self-images, which were blocking their way forward.

But this toppling process was painful—a kind of death. Whether they suffered from bravado or from an inferiority complex, they’d become dependent on this self-made identity.

The thought of letting go caused both grief and fear.

Yet as Jesus points out in these mysterious lines from John, “unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat.”

What has to crumble before we can be born anew is the image, we’ve created of ourselves.

Great adventures lie ahead, but we can only taste and see what God has prepared for us if we’re able to accept ourselves as we actually are: neither perfected nor defective, but instead, overflowing with potential.

Like grains, which—though tiny—contain universes.