Seedlings

 

In recent months, our relatively normal 2nd floor flat has been transformed into a greenhouse. Three varieties of potatoes sprouting in the living room, rose cuttings lining a wall of the kitchen, an old bucket filled with earth and dry bulbs and trays of tiny tomato seeds sat in a sunny spot by the window. 

Given the limited opportunities for entertainment of late it’s been rather captivating viewing. To start with nothing at all, just bare soil. Watering, waiting and watching. Until one by one little green tips started breaking through the dark earth. Most remarkable of them all, the transformation of the tomato seed. A tiny, dry fleck planted in some soil but completely lifeless, it was hard to imagine anything could come from something so seemingly dead. Until we saw it shoot, bright green, face tilted towards the sun, one day to become a towering plant with armfuls of fruit each filled with hundreds of seeds. 

Jesus uses the metaphor of a seed/a grain of wheat in the gospel of John to speak about his imminent death.

 “Let me make this clear, a single grain of wheat will never be more than a single grain of wheat unless it drops into the ground and dies. Because then it sprouts and produces a great harvest of wheat—all because one grain died.”

And theologian John Stott puts it this way, “as long as a seed remains in the dry, warm, security of the granary it will never reproduce itself. It has to be buried in the cold, dark grave of the soil and there it has to die. Then out of its wintry grave, the springtime grain will sprout.”

This is the Christian hope of Easter. That because Jesus didn’t cling to life, but died in darkness there is life for the world. And with that death, a chain of events that means our broken earth will one day be fully beautiful again, bursting with life but without the sting of death or decay. Without injustice or sickness. No longer watered by our tears. 

My tomato plants are a very imperfect picture of this remarkable exchange, but after a year of death feeling so close at hand, they remind me that it won’t have the final word.

Lizzie Harvey. Theos