We know that everything, everything, that dies in Christ comes to life. That includes all that ‘wasted’ effort on self-denial that didn’t bear fruit we could see. We need new creation eyes to learn that nothing done for God is wasted, no seed dies without bearing fruit, even if it isn’t the fruit that we were aiming for.

The seed that dies is the one that bears fruit. That’s what Jesus said in John 12,

Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

John 12.24

A biologist might take issue with us saying a seed has to die before it grows, but they shouldn’t. That’s exactly what happens. It we take a seed and bury it in the earth, something that was once part of a living plant and is now pushed under the earth, what are we to call this but death? Quibbling here is, I think, a symptom of a brain that doesn’t read enough poetry. We could call it a kind of ‘modernist madness’ where everything is defined in the precise mechanistic categories of the natural sciences.

A grain of wheat—a seed—must fall into the earth and die. If it doesn’t it remains alone. If it does it bears fruit, it multiplies. In other words, when we look at the natural world, we learn a principle of the cosmos: things that keep on living die, things that die will live in multiplied life. That one seed grows into a plant that is full of seeds. If those seeds are planted, even if only a quarter of them grow as in Jesus’ parable of the soils (Matthew 13—often called the Sower, but it’s the Soils and the Seed that are in view), the number of seeds grows exponentially. It doesn’t take that long to go from one apple to an orchard, or from an orchard to a world dominated by apple trees, but each step requires the death of that seed.

Jesus was, of course, talking about himself. The seed (think Genesis 3) that dies bears much fruit. After death comes life, if you can be brave enough to submit to it. Jesus continued:

Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

John 12.25

We have to be willing to lose our lives in order to gain them. Not just in martyrdom, which seems an unlikely prospect in the west.

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