Cedric Pisegna - Dying to Live
I am Father Cedric Pisegna, welcome to the program. It’s now the fifth Sunday of Lent, the Gospel is from the Gospel According to John. «Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover feast, came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, 'Sir, we would like to see Jesus.' Philip went and told Andrew, and Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.'» 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. Whoever loves his life loses it, whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life».
The Gospel of the Lord. We are now in the fifth week of Lent, we’re only a week away from Holy Week. And if you remember, Lent is a time of purification and enlightenment, and the enlightenment we’re looking at this week is wisdom. We start to hear about death and the meaning of death, we are not a death-denying church, we’re a death-defying church. Some Greeks come seeking Jesus, Greeks, of course, are the non-Jews. But let’s take it a step further, Greeks are those who are philosophers. If you remember, at Jesus’s birth, we had these magi coming from the East.
Now, a week away from his death, we have these philosophers coming from the West, from the Northwest, from Greece. I had the privilege of studying, during the seminary, I studied in Greece, and I found out all kinds of different things. I also studied a year of philosophy, thinking about Saint Thomas Aquinas, great saint in the Catholic Church, and he said that, «Philosophy is the handmaiden of theology». Philosophy tries to answer questions about, what’s the meaning of life? and how can I be happy? And, what is existence all about? And, who am I? Asks all these different questions, and I found out that there’s many different philosophies. For example, there’s branches called the Sophists, the Cynics, the Skeptics, the Epicureans, the Stoics.
Some of the philosophers I’m sure you’ve heard of, Plato and Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras. Greece was the center of learning and philosophy in the Ancient World, this is where these people are coming from. They’re philosophers and they want something new, they want something novel. They’ve heard all kinds of different philosophers talk, but they’ve heard about this Jesus who supposedly has a new philosophy. So they come to him seeking Jesus, and Phillip and Andrew tell Jesus, and Jesus gives them a philosophy, and I hope you get this. Jesus gives them a novel wisdom, I hope you get this, that was something more than they bargained for and something that they never heard before.
Now, we’re talking about people that came from Greece who have heard all kinds of things and all kinds of philosophies, they come to Jesus and this is what he tells them. Get this, now. Jesus says, «Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it just remains a grain of wheat; but if it dies,» underline that, «If it dies, it bears much fruit». In another program, I talked about bearing fruit and I said that the meaning of life and the meaning of Lent, really is about bearing fruit, and I describe what bearing fruit means. It doesn’t mean that we have bananas or oranges are apples, bearing fruit means that you develop your relationship with God primarily, it means that you bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit, patience and love and joy and peace and gentleness. And it also means becoming, realizing your potential.
Remember, who you are is God’s gift to you, but who you become is your gift to God. So that’s what it means to bear fruit. But Jesus is giving them something revolutionary in this saying, novel, new. And I’ve studied philosophy before I studied theology, as I said, it’s the handmaiden of theology, I never heard anything like this in any of the philosophers. Jesus gave them something amazing, full of wisdom. And he talked about, unless you die you cannot live. We’ve heard that in the Gospel, he said, «Whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life». We have to die to live, «Take up your cross daily and follow me». Saint Paul the Apostle said, «I die daily».
So he’s giving us some type of a wisdom here that the Greeks had never heard of before and they got more than they bargained for; they were looking to the Son of God to give them something significant. I lived in Sacramento for 10 years at the beginning of my ministry, and I went down south about four hours, took a drive one time to a place called Sequoia National Park. Sequoia National Park has some of the tallest trees, if not the tallest trees in the world. And you look up at these trees and they’re amazing in their size and in their height. One tree that’s a big attraction, it’s called the General Sherman Tree. And get this, it’s called the largest living thing in the world. 2,500 years old, 275 feet high, 4 million pounds, it’s enormous.
Somebody sent me one of the seeds, the seed to the Sequoia tree is tiny. A tiny seed becomes an enormous tree when it dies, and that’s the wisdom that Jesus is giving us here. He’s saying, who you are now, what you are now is a seed of what you can become. It’s the beginning of what you were meant to be, who you were meant to be. In the Catholic Church we call it the Paschal Mystery: that’s when through dying there is a rising, not just at the end of life but every day there’s a dying and rising. And that term, that theological term was coined probably back in the '50s and the '60s, Paschal Mystery, I’ll get back to that in a moment. We all started as a seed. Sperm meets an egg, you’ve all heard about that, it’s fertilized, changes into an embryo.
Then, eight weeks, it becomes a fetus. Once it’s a fetus, there’s a gestation period of about seven months, and then it becomes a baby. And then we change, we become an adult, then we die, and then there’s something more. In a nutshell, that’s what Jesus is telling us. We have as a symbol for resurrection, if you remember on Easter, oftentimes it will be an Easter egg hunt. Well the egg is a symbol of new life. If you know, there’s an inner content to the egg, and in order for that inner content to get out, the egg hatches and then the chick comes out totally different than what it used to be. And that’s a symbol for Easter because we all start out one way and then there’s a hatching, a death, and then we change into what we were meant to be.
The caterpillar also comes from an egg, there are all these different stages: the egg, the caterpillar, the chrysalis, then eventually, the butterfly. This is an example from nature, and this is what Jesus is telling us. If we die, if we take up our cross daily and die, and I’ll explain that more, if we go through the stages, then eventually we will rise. And it really struck me that right now my whole life is but a seed, and eventually in time, at the right time, when I’m ready, when God is ready for me, the seed has to die, only to live in a new way, only to become in a new way, only to experience resurrection. We, too, as human beings, go through the life cycle, we go through stages and it’s very natural; and what Jesus is giving us is another way to look about death.
Death is not the cessation of life, it’s not the end of life, it’s the transformation that we’re all heading toward, it’s a very natural process, it’s something that God has designed, put right into us, into our DNA. Our bodies are gonna wear out and we’re gonna die. Don’t be afraid of it, you’re a believer in Christ, you believe in the resurrection. It’s a very natural thing, nature shows us exactly what it is. And this is the wisdom that Jesus is giving these Greeks when they came to him. Well along the way, not only are we gonna rise at the end of our life but along the way, we have to die to ourself. This is what Lent is teaching us. As Jesus taught, «Whoever loses himself for my sake will find it».
Paul said, «I die daily». I quoted that earlier. «Take up your cross daily and follow me,» and in today’s Gospel, «Whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for life eternal». This death and resurrection will happen at the end of our physical existence, but it happens every day. This is what Lent is nudging us toward, this Paschal Mystery, so that, as it were, we’re inside a chrysalis and we’re being transformed, we’re being purified, we’re being sanctified. In order for that to happen, there has to be daily deaths. What do I mean by daily deaths? What is this Paschal Mystery? We have to die from selfishness to selflessness, that’s the journey of life.
There’s a word in the Greek, speaking of Jesus, called kenosis. Kenosis is when Jesus, although he was in the form of divinity, he emptied himself and became human. That emptying himself, that death to what he was is called Kenosis; he went and became human. In the same way, we have to go from selfishness to selflessness, there has to be an emptying of self. In order for that to happen, there has to be a death, a death to self, I’ll try to explain it further: from our will to God’s will. And if you’re really trying to follow God’s will, that’s death to self; from negativity to being positive, from being stingy to being generous, from being fearful to being courageous and daring, from being lazy to being creative. This is how we bear fruit, this is what I mean, «Who you are is God’s gift to you, but who you become is your gift to God».
There has to be a transformation in our life, and I think about my own life. The creativity demands work and it demands sacrifice, and I always don’t feel like it but writing books and producing for TV, traveling around the country preaching, this is how I bear fruit; trying to add value to people’s life, trying to reach out beyond the walls of the church, bring people in to have a personal relationship with Jesus and to be fruitful. But in order to be fruitful, there has to be death, there has to be sacrifice, this is Paschal Mystery. I wanted to share with you about one of the priests that I met when I joined the Passionists. I joined the Passionists community about 35 years ago, I was professed back in 1985, so even more than 35 years ago.
And in our community there are many priests, and one of the priests that I met was a big, tall Italian, Father Jim, taller than I, I’m 6'2″ but he was like 6'6″-6'7″ and he was very good looking, very striking, had a big wingspan. He was a very dynamic preacher. At a young age, in his fiftys, he contacted cancer, ended up crippling him, and I went to visit him. Gone was the booming voice and the beautiful hair, and he had lost most of his faculties. And as I looked at him, shadow of who he used to be, he looked at me and he said, «Father Cedric, please bless me».
And I was always used to him being in control and having so much power and having so much authority, and now I saw a man who had been humbled and purified. God did not give him the cancer, but God used that to bring him new life. A death occurred in him, a death that I believe, like a seed opening, costs something new to sprout. And I see people in hospitals, people that I visit in their homes, that are going through all kinds of different diseases and hardships and sicknesses. And the bottom line is God isn’t afflicting us with these things, he’s not punishing us, we get these because it’s in our DNA, it’s in our genes from our family, and it’s part and parcel of being human.
The bottom line is, sooner or later, we are all going to, like the seed, die to what it was and become something different. And as I visit people, most of the people that I talk to say that they come closer to God in this. I think about one of my friends who had a hip operation and he told me that because of the hip operation, he’s actually become closer to God. Now think about what the pandemic has done for people. Many people have, although there’s isolation and there’s different hardships, most people in the pandemic, myself included, have come closer to God. It’s been a monastic moment, really, for the whole world, for anybody who will accept it. Sufferings have that drive, that motivation in them, almost built into them, to change us. The seed must die, that’s what Paschal Mystery is.
Every time we get together and celebrate Eucharist, celebrate Mass or any other sacrament, confession is a sacrament, the anointing of the sick is a sacrament, marriage, ordination is a sacrament, whatever sacrament we are celebrating, it’s always a rising, but it’s always a death. The two go together, death and resurrection. In fact, at the end of Holy Week, it starts on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and then the Easter Vigil, we call that the Triduum. The Triduum really is one great celebration although it’s broken into the Last Supper, the Death of Jesus on the cross, and then the Resurrection at Easter. Theologically, we call it one. The Paschal Mystery is that way, it all goes together, death and resurrection.
The seed has to die and it becomes something new. This is what Jesus is telling these Greeks. I remember also, one of our great saints in the Catholic Church, Saint John of the Cross, he wrote about something called the Dark Night of the Soul. I’ve talked about suffering physically, but there’s also suffering spiritually, as well as emotionally. He talked about the Dark Night of the Soul as being, as a believer, all of a sudden you start losing your sense of consolation and comfort and the sense of the nearness of God, and that can be a great suffering. But what it’s designed to do is to help us to develop and become even more trusting and more faithful, and even closer to God.
I quote this often, Jesus said, «Blessed are they who believe without seeing». We don’t have a relationship with God just so that we can have the glory and the comfort, we have a relationship with God because we love God. And sometimes, God will actually remove that consolation, not to punish us, but to actually work in us in a powerful way death and resurrection. Maybe you’re going through that in your spiritual life right now. There are stages in the spiritual life, there are rhythms, there are seasons in the spiritual life and just because you’re in that right now doesn’t mean that that’s the way it’s gonna be for the rest of your life. Accept it, let God do the work in you, stay faithful; death and resurrection.
I got a letter from a man in prison, and he said that prison is lonely, it’s dark, and it’s hard. Day after day, he prayed and he sought, and actually he found God in prison, in the darkness, through the hardship. And he sensed God calling him to study the Scriptures, and now he hopes to become a minister one day, because not only did he find God, he found a call, and he’s going to be getting out soon and he believes that God has called him to be a minister once he gets out, and to share the Gospel in prison. Many of you, some of you are watching my programs in prison, and I want to tell you that, as it says in Psalm 139, that God surrounds us. He’s close to us no matter where we are, whether we’re in heaven or in hell, Sheol, God is there altogether.
And even in tough circumstances, God is there. Death, resurrection. Sometimes it’s in the darkness of life, the darkness of our mother’s womb we grew, the darkness of the soil, the seed sprouts and become something new. And often it’s the dark things, the bottoming out, the accidents, the addictions, the loneliness, the sufferings, the spiritual desolation, that brings new life. That’s Paschal Mystery, folks. This is what Jesus is telling the philosophers, they’d never heard anything like this but this is the wisdom of Christianity, the wisdom of Catholicism, Paschal Mystery. We have to understand that we view life and death differently than our culture. We’re not a death-denying church, where a death-defying church. The early church actually grew through persecution.
If you remember, as they were proclaiming the Word they were being persecuted. And it says in The Acts of the Apostles, the Apostles were scattered all throughout the world. Picture seeds, if you’ve ever seen a dandelion, you blow on it and the seeds go everywhere, and sometimes it’s the wind and the persecution and the suffering that scatters us, that makes us more fruitful, that expands our boundaries, that makes us blessed. I want you to see what life really is, not as the culture sees it, but has Christianity sees it.
Sometimes we have to die to live, and that’s Christianity. We must go through a dying and then there will be the resurrection. These philosophers from the West came, the Magi came, wanted to see the Christ child, but now, toward his death, these philosophers steeped in all these different ideas and philosophies, they knew about Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and all these others. Jesus, what do you have to say? And in one sentence Jesus gives them this mysterious yet profound wisdom. «Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die,» and Jesus knew he was about to go through that, «It just remains a grain of wheat; but if it die, it will bear much fruit».
And I’m praying that you will understand from nature that a seed has to die to become a tree, that a caterpillar has to be metamorphosized to become a butterfly, and you have to die daily to be changed, and eventually to be resurrected. In order to become who we were meant to be a death must occur. And I am praying as a result of this program, you won’t be afraid, you’ll embrace the daily deaths, and eventually your own death, and God will raise you up. And remember, who you are is God’s gift to you, but who you become is your gift to God. May Almighty God bless you, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Don’t just live, «Live with Passion»!