As videos of persecuted Christians in the Mideast go viral, it’s a good time to be hearing this Sunday’s Gospel lesson from John 12:20-33. That little girl declaring that she wishes no harm to ISIS members who drove her from her home, but only wants to forgive them, is an incarnation of Jesus’ teaching that we gain our lives when we lose them.
And as Christians actually lose their lives in various places around the world, we recall Tertullian’s words, often wrongly quoted as “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” but in actuality perhaps even stronger in its true form. What Tertullian said was, “As often as you mow us down, the more numerous we become. The blood of Christians is the seed.”
May our Lord give us grace to truly believe His teaching about falling like a seed to the ground and dying, and to discover how to practice that in whatever form of sacrificial living God asks of us.