Seeds of Life

Did you know that tomatoes are actually a fruit, not a vegetable? I thought you would: not because you’ve spent a lot of time researching the debate over how to classify fruits vs. vegetables, but because most people grew up with some version of a local know-it-all kid who lived for the opportunity to say, “Did you know…” to show off what they consider to be some arcane correction to a commonly-held idea or understanding: “Did you know that a hurricane in the Eastern Hemisphere is called a typhoon?”  “Did you know that the Sun is just a star, and not even a very big one?” “Did you know that tomatoes are not a vegetable, they’re a fruit.”

The know-it-all is mostly right in this case, of course. There’s some debate over whether a tomato might count as both a fruit and a vegetable, but it definitely qualifies as a fruit. Vegetables are generally considered a vegetable because they are the edible part of a plant: leaves, roots, stems, and so on. Fruits, on the other hand, come from the plant rather than being a part of the plant itself; they come from the plant’s flower, to be precise, and most importantly, they contain seeds. That’s what matters for the scientific determination.

Colloquially, we think rather simply of fruits as things that are sweet, and vegetables as things that are savory in some way. But in terms of science, it doesn’t matter at all whether they’re sweet or not. There lots of fruits that we wouldn’t even think to list if someone asked us to name as many fruits as we know. Peppers and cucumbers are fruits. Pea pods and olives are fruits. Chestnuts and hazelnuts are fruits. And peanuts are actually a legume. (Sorry, that’s not important; I just got into the know-it-all groove there.)

And because every fruit bears a seed, it is seeds that eventually bear fruit. That’s what Jesus is talking about in this rather confusing passage from John. The story begins with several Greeks, meaning Jews who were from elsewhere in the Mediterranean, not Judea. They approach his disciple Philip, and one says respectfully: “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” So Philip goes to Andrew, another disciple, and they both go to Jesus and told him. And Jesus answers with something that does not really seem to be an answer: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” 

What does that have to do with meeting a couple of Greeks? Well, it seems like he’s saying that part of his ministry, the people seeking him and the teaching and the miraculous signs and such, is over. This story takes place after Palm Sunday, so the ball is rolling fast towards the events of Holy Week, and Jesus frequently refers to his destined death as his hour to be glorified in John’s Gospel, so that seems to be his answer about the Greeks.

But then he goes into another teaching cycle just for those disciples themselves. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,” he says, “it remains just a single grain. But if it dies; it bears much fruit.” Jesus may have been a carpenter’s son, but he understood the basics of farming. When I used to spend time on my grandfather’s farm in Alabama growing up, he did his best to teach this city boy the basics of farming. He was actually a cattle farmer for his income, but he did grow some fruits and vegetables and grains in a large field adjacent to their house, and in what he called his “garden” which was still about an acre in size, and I learned a lot between talking to him and helping him in the field.

I remember driving in his pick-up truck one day on the way to do something with him, and going by a huge field of corn that belonged to someone else. It was row after row after row of big corn stalks, and all of them were brown and dry and brittle. I had seen this before, but never asked about it, so I said, “why do farmers let their corn die?” He explained that you had to wait until that happened to harvest it because that’s when the corn was ready to be picked, which was done in the big combine machines I had seen in the fields around there. A combine does everything in harvesting corn: it collects the whole plant, separates the corncobs from the stalks, separates the corn seeds from the cob, and stores the seed while dispersing everything else back out into the field for fertilizer, all automatically.

“I like eating my corn on the cob,” I said; “do they have a combine that keeps it on there?” “No, but none of this corn is for eating,” he said. “This is probably just seed corn.” And I remember being impressed for the first time by the idea that people planted seeds to get more seeds, and just one of those corn kernels, those seeds, when planted, would produce a plant that would have multiple corncobs on it, and each corncob would have hundreds of seeds of its own. So with just one seed, you could plant a whole field of corn in just a few growing seasons.

Did you know that corn is technically a fruit? Without being too much of a know-it-all, I hope, it’s true: the corncob is not part of the rest of the plant, and it is filled with hundreds of seeds. And the same goes for wheat. Wheat doesn’t have a cob, of course, but the flowering part of the plant produces a wheat “head,” and each of those has about 50 wheat kernels inside of it, and each stalk of wheat has about five heads, on average. Which, again, means that just one wheat kernel can multiply into a whole field of wheat with a little intentionality and patience. But again, this can only happen if you wait long enough for the plant and seed to mature and dry and yes, essentially “die,” before the seed is harvested and planted.

So, you see, Jesus is saying quite a lot in this brief teaching that he offers the disciples. He’s essentially saying that, in one of the most basic natural processes of the world, death provides the seeds of life, and abundant life at that. When the wheat plant and its seeds die, it is then that its fruitfulness actually multiplies exponentially in a way that is almost limitless, as seeds lead to flowering plants and fruits that leads to that many more seeds, and so on.  

Now, Jesus is talking first and foremost about his own impending death as the first “seed” of the eternal and abundant life that God has promised through him, a seed that has to die in order to bear fruit that multiplies throughout the world. But he’s also talking about anybody who follows him: “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.”

That language of hating one’s life in the world sounds harsh to our ears and has been much abused to justify enduring all kinds of injustice in this world by certain Christians, but there is nothing, nothing whatsoever, that is fruitful about valuing one’s life as worthless. In that culture, the word “hate” was used as hyperbole in the same way you and I would say, “I’m starving” if we skipped lunch.

What Jesus is really saying is that if we live a self-centered life, if what we love is all about what we can get from others to benefit ourselves, then we lose the whole point of life itself: to live in community, in communion, with God and our neighbors, loving and serving one another instead of focusing solely on ourselves. And that is radical and demanding enough without getting into models of unjust martyrdom. Because that love for others is how our lives truly bear fruit, fruit that bears seeds that will multiply God’s gracious love into the world.

After all, Jesus never said, “if a seed dies, it bears many vegetables,” and not because Jesus hated his vegetables. It’s just that a vegetable, for the most part, can only feed one person, and generally not even in a satisfying or even life-giving way at that. Have you ever made a satisfying meal out of a single carrot? Even many vegetables from a seed wouldn’t get you very far; when all the vegetables from that seed were consumed, that would be the end. But fruit bears many seeds which each bear many fruits themselves; it is a cycle of life and abundance that is almost limitless after it begins. That is what you and I are called to be as disciples of Jesus Christ: seeds of life, of the abundant life that Jesus himself seeded with his crucifixion and generated through the fruit of his resurrection.

So what kind of seed are you? Maybe a better question would be, what kind of seed are you right now? Because I think if we overliteralize Jesus’ metaphor we accidentally limit the true power of the life he’s inviting us into, a life that allows us to bear all kinds of different fruit in the right season. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul lists the fruits of the Spirit that we can bear as seeds of Christ’s love: “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

Perhaps that’s as good a place as any to begin asking ourselves, what are the seeds I have for fruitfulness in this season? Because all of those are good and faithful fruits with the power to multiply greatly; but we each probably find ourselves particular fruitful in one area in any given moment or season. What do I have to offer that will be fruitful and multiply in my life in this season? And some of the most important fruit is not always sweet, especially at first taste: victory can seem sweeter than peace; wealth can seem sweeter than generosity; self-indulgence can seem sweeter than self-control.

But the real question is whether what we bear has the seeds to multiply fruitfully in the world. Because the world is hungry, is starving, for all the fruits of the Spirit right now, but each of us has particular opportunities to be the seed of life in Christ in and through our lives of faithfulness, right now, and for the fruit we bear to multiply in ways that we can scarcely imagine. The only question is whether we allow ourselves to be planted and bloom as God has always intended for us.