John 12:20-33

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.

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In college I had the most excellent of bicycles. It was a ten-speed with a small, rock-hard, seat, racing handlebars, a delicate frame, and tires so thin, you could barely believe they would hold you up or support you as you moved forward. Unbelievably light and fast, it was the apple of my eye, more exciting than any boyfriend I would ever meet in college, more exhilarating than any class I would ever take there.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you about its color. The frame was metallic gold—the stuff of queens and kings, the stuff of military medals and Byzantine art, the stuff of all that is rich and heavenly.

To ride this bike, this golden bike, so fast and so beautiful, was to have all speed, all beauty, all youth.

But one day as all speed, all beauty, and all youth was riding down the hill from North Campus where the humanities were taught to South Campus where the Agriculture School was located, one day, all speed, all beauty, all youth hit a patch of something rough or was it something slippery or was it just my own recklessness? I don’t remember exactly. I only know that all at once I was tumbling forward, sprung off my little rock-hard seat, pitched over the racing handle bars, flying over the delicate metallic gold frame and the unbelievably thin tires and falling, falling, down onto the side of the street where only gravel and indignity lived.

And while I was falling in one of those rare, slow-motion moments I remember thinking to myself: “You are falling, Melissa. Remember what this feels like. You will experience this again.”

I was right, of course. I would experience many more falls—some of them of my own making, some of them just because. The question for me would be: what would I do with them? Or perhaps what would they do to me?

In John’s Gospel for today Jesus is on the cusp of what will be his great fall—his crucifixion and death. He and his companions are already in Jerusalem with the teeming crowds who would be there to celebrate the Passover when some Greeks who’ve heard of Jesus tell Philip that they want to see Jesus. Philip and Andrew tell Jesus this, but instead of a direct response to their request, he says these words:

“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”….”Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say: ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth, it remains single, alone, but if it falls and dies, it bears much fruit; a troubled soul that does not ask or get to be saved from the experience of falling down; the glorification of God surrounding it all.

These densely packed ideas give us a view of John’s Jesus. He is not like the other Gospels’ depictions of Jesus, but rather is, as one Biblical commentator has said, he is a kind of mysterious “stranger from heaven” who travels freely between the realms of heaven and earth, through whom we come to salvation, to our soul’s health. In this regard, then, John’s Jesus is more a walking incarnational theology than a person with whom we can easily identify.

But for me Jesus’ words in our Gospel also say something about what it is to live a Christian life in the midst of the many falls we will take along our way— whether those falls come as public tumbles along our speedy paths or whether they come to us as more quietly, more privately, the falling we will inevitably experience along the quiet footpath that is our life.

In my thinking, this approach has these components—all of which are in Jesus’ own words: First, accepting or receiving the experience of falling; second, within that experience, coming to a stance of refusing to be a victim; and, third, out of that refusal, accepting and claiming the glory given, fullness of life within and beyond the experience.

Let me say just a little about each of these.

Accepting or receiving the experience of falling. To get back tp bicycles for a moment, some of you may remember the odd little TV show called “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” some years back. In it Pee Wee Herman, an adult man played a naïve but devilish little boy who had many adventures with his odd group of friends. One of my favorite moments in the show was when Pee Wee fell off his bike in front of his friends and, clearly humiliated insisted “I meant to do that.”

The acceptance or receiving of our experiences of taking a fall have to do with dropping the pretense of control and saying yes to the troubled mind and soul, to the anguish that comes with falling. In our little vignette from the Gospel of John the word Jesus uses to describe this is “tarasso” meaning the kind of agitation and rolling that comes when a ship is on very turbulent waters. Acceptance and receiving our experience of falling has to do with allowing the turbulence and the pain in.

Coming to a stance of refusing to be a victim. To say this so tersely is misleading in terms of the time it can take after we fall to the ground to move out of the temptation to play or to stay in the stance of victim. For me, refusing to be a victim comes about within or after a process a radical reorientation in which I, with God’s help, come to find that victim hood is intolerable, because it is not what I or we were ultimately created to be. And so we must refuse it, stand without it as our identity, and wait. In the Gospel of John, this is suggested in the way Jesus speaks of the cross as being “lifted up.”

Finally, accepting and claiming the glory given, the fullness of life within and beyond the experience. This is what comes as we, with God’s help, stand upon our ground again—the fullness of our lives returned to us in a different way, the multiplied fruit after the seed falls to the ground and dies. It is not the same as life was before our fall. In my experience and drawing on the idea of glory in the Gospel of John as radiance, it can be a life lived with a different sense of radiance.

In his book Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life, Philip Simmons, a victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease, writes about what his disease, a disease that literally caused him to fall over and over again. He speaks of what it means to learn to fall and how this is connected to mystery and a new radiance in life.

“….life is not a problem to be solved. What do I mean by that? Surely life presents us with problems…We learned our method from the Greeks. From childhood on we are taught to be little Aristotles. We observe the world, we break down what we see into its component parts. We perceive problems and set about solving them, laying out our solutions in ordered sequences like the instructions for assembling a child’s bicycle. We have gotten so good at this method that we apply it to everything…We choose to see life as a technical matter.

And here is where we go wrong. For at its deepest levels life is not a problem, but a mystery. The distinction…is fundamental: problems are to be solved, true mysteries are not. Personally, I wish I could have learned this lesson more easily—without, perhaps, having to give up my tennis game. But each of us finds his or her own way to mystery. At one time or another, each of us confronts an experience so powerful, bewildering, joyous, or terrifying that all our efforts to see it as a “problem” are futile. Each of us is brought to the cliff’s edge. At such moments we can either back away in bitterness or confusion, or leap forward into mystery. And what does mystery ask of us? Only that we be in its presence, that we fully, consciously, hand ourselves over. That is all, and that is everything. We can participate in mystery only by letting go of solutions. This letting go is the first lesson of falling, and the hardest.”

And he goes on:

“Think again of falling as a figure of speech. We fall on our faces, we fall for a joke, we fall for someone, we fall in love. In each of these falls, what do we fall away from? We fall from ego, we fall from our carefully constructed identities, our reputations, our precious selves. We fall from ambition, we fall from grasping, we fall, at least temporarily, from reason. And what do we fall into? We fall into passion, into terror, into unreasoning joy. We fall into humility, into compassion, into emptiness, into oneness with forces larger than ourselves, into oneness with others whom we realize are likewise falling. We fall, at last, into the presence of the sacred, into godliness, into mystery, into our better, diviner natures.

Works Cited or Consulted

Philip Simmons: Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life

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