One Life to Love

Sermon for Sunday, March 29, 2009
Scripture: John 12:20-33

“Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Well, I guess last week’s sermon of fully embracing life was totally off base. I spent all that time talking about how important it is to embrace the hopeful life, and now Jesus is telling us to hate our life in this world. So apparently, we’re supposed to be miserable. We’re supposed to wish we were dead. Well then, that doesn’t sound like a life filled with hope, now does it?

Here’s the dichotomy: hate our life or love our life. Hating earthly life: GOOD. Loving earthly life: BAD. What in the heck is Jesus talking about? Doesn’t he want us to enjoy life? Doesn’t he love us? Why would he want us to be miserable? If you’re often confused by this verse of hating vs. loving life, don’t worry: you’re not alone. It’s not an easy text to understand. Sometimes it confuses me too. But let’s give it a shot together today. Let’s unpack this love/hate thing that Jesus is crossing us up with.

When we read this text, the first helpful thing to know is that the love/hate theme is a popular one in Greek writing. It is often used as an exaggeration to signify preference of one thing over another. So here Jesus is saying you must prefer life in Christ over your own earthly life. But this isn’t supposed to be some type of self-loathing. Jesus isn’t telling us to live a life that we absolutely detest. We’re not supposed to be running around crying “I hate my life!” all the time. This is not Christ’s command here.

Nor is this verse a command to “be like Jesus” in suffering. We are not all called to be martyrs and die for our faith. We are not all called to suffer just as Jesus suffered. And we don’t need to suffer or die for God to love us. So, Jesus is not calling us to engage in self-flagellation, in physically punishing ourselves for sins we may have committed. There is no need for that.

What Jesus means here is that we must prefer one way of thinking over another. It is not hating our earthly life and wishing we could just die “to be with Jesus.” That way of thinking produces nothing but laziness, boasting, and lack of love for our neighbors. The goal is not to hate one existence – our present existence – and long for our future existence in eternal life. The message Jesus teaches us here is a message of reorientation. It’s a message of thinking about things in a new way. Jesus really loves to do that – get us to think about things in new ways.

Those who love their life will not gain life in Christ, and those who hate their life will have life in Christ. You see, it’s when we let our selfish ambitions rule our lives that we lose life in Christ. It’s the desire to control our life, to say, “It’s MY life, and I’ll do what I want,” that we must reject. It’s interesting the songs that people sing:

“It’s your thing, do what you wanna do now.”

“It’s my life, it’s now or never, I ain’t gonna live forever, I just wanna live while I’m alive.”

“I wanna talk about me, wanna talk about I, wanna talk about number one oh me oh my.”

As long as we maintain control over our lives and fall in love with that control, we will be unable to find life in Christ. We will be unable to have Christ live in us. We can say, “I own my life, it’s my life, and it’s my way or the highway.” Or, we can say, “Have thine own way, Lord, have thine own way. You are the potter, and I am the clay. Mold me and make me after thy will, while I am waiting, yielded and still.” We can hold the title of ownership to our life, or we can sign that title over to the one to whom our life was meant to belong to: God our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.

Jesus offers a brilliant analogy in his teaching here, that of a grain of wheat. “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.” You see, when a grain of wheat falls into the earth, it has two choices. It can insist that it remain a seed. “I am a grain, a seed, and I will forever be a seed. But within that seed is the potential for new life, for new growth. The grain of wheat that falls to the earth and insists on remaining a seed is like the person who wants to maintain control and ownership. It’s the person who says, “I am a seed. That I know and that I can control. And I’m not going to let some other, new life spring forth from me. I’m perfectly comfortable as a seed.”

But the grain of wheat that falls onto the earth and dies to its own motives, its own desires as a seed, is the one that prospers. That is the seed that is selfless – the one who says, “Have thine own way, new life within me. Have thine own way.” It’s the seed that says, “I will let this life contained within me to burst forth and take over, so that I am no longer a seed but a new stalk of wheat. My own desires have died so that the life within me can now take over.”

We are all like a grain of wheat. We have two choices: to think of ourselves first, or to think of the potential for Christ to live through us. Like any grain of wheat falling to the earth, we all have great potential for Christ to live in and through us. We all have a piece of Christ living within us, just waiting to shoot forth and prosper in the sun. But if Christ is to live in and through us, we must cede control. We must give up control of our life to Jesus Christ if he is to enact a transformation within us. We can love the control and love our seediness so much that we are forever an unproductive, worthless seed. Or, we can give up control, sign ownership of our life over to Christ, and become transformed by that new life that is just waiting to spring forth from us. We can allow ourselves to become new creations, controlled by someone even greater than us.

The call this morning is clear: we must let Jesus take control of our lives. We must allow Jesus to be in charge, rather than insisting that we maintain control. For if we maintain control, how will any growth and transformation take place? If we maintain ownership, if we love thinking of it as our life, then how can Christ ever live in and through us? We must give up our desire to think about this life as “ours,” instead allowing it to become “Christ’s life within us.” We must not control, but be controlled. For the only life we can keep eternally is the life of Jesus Christ within us. If we treat it as our life, it will be our life, and it will end when it ends. But if our life becomes the life of Christ within us, that life is eternal. Christ’s life is eternal, so the only way to inherit eternal life is to allow our life to die for the sake of Christ’s life within us.

So let us die to ourselves so that Christ may live within us. Let us lose control over our earthly life, and gain the control of Jesus Christ in and through us. Let us sign away our lives to God, for eternity. May the lives we live not be our own to control, but be lives that Christ lives through us. In the name of the one who Creates, Redeems, and Sustains that life. Amen.