Broken

Very truly, I tell you, 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. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. John 12:24-25

There was a business management book written in 1992 that was both practical and prophetic. The title was: If It Ain’t Broke, Break it. It was by Robert Kriegle and was sub-titled, “Unconventional Wisdom for a Changing Business World.” Kriegle correctly theorized that the methods of doing business in the 1990s would change radically, though almost no one could have correctly guessed how much it would change. In 1992, after all, the word ‘Internet’ was still a foreign word to most people. It would be three more years before anyone had a browser to use with their computers. And Wal-Mart still had to prove itself against such retailing powerhouses as K-Mart and Montgomery Ward.

Kriegle warned that the old ways of doing business in a global, digitally driven, economy wouldn’t work. Stockpiling- of raw goods or finished products- was over. Customer and employee loyalty were rapidly fading concepts. (My dad had a 60 year pin from his employment with Firestone Tire and Rubber! It was probably one of the last such pins that will ever be earned.)

Maintaining the status quo- staying safe, avoiding chances- would prove to be deadly to many companies and businesses in the 1990s. Breaking with the old and established ways of doing business was a risk, Kriegle said, that would prove to be a necessity. There would be a risk involved; some companies would simply not be able to make it, even if they did try to fashion themselves in the new economy. But there was no chance of growing larger, or better (in a business sense), without making those changes.

Now, fascinatingly, I think, something similar was being said by Jesus long before that, too. He was responding to hearing that there were a group of Greeks in Jerusalem that wanted to meet him. Suddenly, Jesus was made aware that doors to the Kingdom of God, through his message, were wide open. These Greeks were simply the first of the non-Jewish, non-Palestinian groups and individuals that would be making their way to him. Even in his limited ministry of one-to-one contact with people, Jesus was being overwhelmed, and often had to make retreats for his own spiritual, emotional, and physical strength. Something had to change. And the ‘change,’ which was about to happen, was unlike anything the disciples or anyone thinking about life from a human viewpoint, could possibly have envisioned.

Jesus likened his imminent death to the death of a seed in the ground. When a seed dies, it produces new life. One grain becomes a new stalk, and a new stalk yields fruit of a hundred new grains. Those grains then produce thousands more plants, producing tens of thousands more grains.

Jesus was choosing to take the difficult path. If he had taken the “safe” way through life, the “loved but lost” life he referred to in the above quote, he would have begun speaking with less of an edge to his words. He would have shown more respect to the powers-that-be: the Romans and the Pharisees. He would have spent less time with riff-raff, and surely would have stopped drawing so much attention to himself. He might have written a few books, gone on a speaking tour of Israel and the Mediterranean, and retired to a cushy appointed office somewhere in the bureaucracies of King Herod. Jesus had those choices. He could have lived, but he would have died. No one beyond the second century would have ever heard of him again.

Instead, Jesus lived in a very ‘unsafe’ way, a way that guaranteed his death. He acted as if he hated the safe ways of life available to him. He was moving toward an inevitable end, but did nothing to stop it! But because he allowed himself to die, he was able to be resurrected by God! Because he took a chance, with an unsafe way of life, his seed was transformed into a wheat field. Because he allowed the grain of his one life to die, wheat fields took root throughout the middle East, then Africa, then the Mediterranean, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. There is infinitely more Bread of Life in the world today, than there was the day that first grain fell dead into the ground.

And it happened because one man, the son of God, didn’t live the easy way. Imagine what could be, if those millions of sons and daughters of God alive today, made the choice to live uneasily, in unsafe, daring, and eternal ways! What if only 10,000 of us, living lives of safe mediocrity, fitting in well with the world, and planning, hoping to die quietly of some infirmity of old age..what if just 10,000 of us from the whole world of millions of believing disciples, chose..

.. the other way? The ‘broken’ way?

The way that leads to new wheat fields, bushels and bushels of new grain, and unimaginable servings of the Bread of Life..