Fifth Sunday of Lent

Father Robert Kinyon
Homily from the Televised Mass, NewsCenter1
Fifth Sunday of Lent, March 17, 2024

The Greeks within this Gospel express the universal, albeit oftentimes latent and rarely articulated, desire of all of humanity, which is to see Jesus. “Sir, we want to see Jesus,” the Greeks say to Philip.

That is in fact true. That’s our desire. At the root of all our multiform, restless, and rarely ever satiated desires, is the desire for the infinite. It is the desire for God — he who created us, he knows what our needs are, and he alone who can fulfill it. As quasi-infinite are my longings, so too must they be fulfilled by something that is in fact infinite and that is God. 

Jesus’ response to them is also very interesting. He says to them not, “Great. You’re ready to go. Here we are.” 

Rather he says curiously, “Amen, Amen, I say to you unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”

Here he’s speaking to the fact that our vision, that great desire that we have to see Jesus, must actually be trained. That desire needs to be formed and that formation of desire can in fact at times be painful because it always involves death. It always involves death. 

Jesus speaks here to the great mystery, as it’s called, of the grain of wheat. Only the grain of wheat that dies is the one that produces fruit. Only we who train our vision, train our looking at things to become true vision, only we are able to see him. 

The great news is that the grain of wheat is actually Jesus himself. It’s he who actually died for us and in his death, he’s now made it a possibility for us to see him. Through his death as the grain of wheat, you and I, too, can become grains of wheat provided that we follow him. “Wherever I am, my servant must follow,” he tells us here. 

The way that we follow him is actually through the offering up of our lives. Our lives are meaningful and valuable to the extent that we make a gift of it. To the extent that we offer it back to God, and he accepts everything. He accepts the joys of life that we can offer to him. So, too, does he accept the sorrows, the pains, and the home boundedness of our lives. We can offer that to him. It’s actually Jesus’ most painful moment that brings about our salvation. 

So, too, does that play out for us. We can offer our own crosses to him and in so doing we become those grains of wheat, and he will bless it, he will glorify it — the Father will as he did with Jesus’ life himself. May we have the courage to offer ourselves fully to him this week. Amen.