The word was out about a fellow over around Galilee who was giving demonstrations on how to live. It was an adult education course on how to make a fresh start on life. Everyone was gossiping about the teacher, Jesus. He had become quite an attraction.

Some in the Greek world were showing up for the meetings, too. Greeks are not easily impressed. If you get Greek attention, you are really cooking. Those Greeks represented the intellectual world.

You can sense the excitement of Andrew and Philip when they introduced the two Greek fellows to Jesus. Maybe this time He would make a good impression. The movement could use some people of means. But Jesus was not into making good impressions. He took a stalk of wheat and said, "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it can bear no fruit."

To make a fresh start with our lives, we must first imitate the wheat. Here John brings us to the central core of the Gospel and the central reason for the Lenten season: One must die if one would live. We must lose our lives if we are to find them. Only through death will life come.

Do you find that humiliating?

Why must life always be on the other side of death? One time I searched the Gospels to see if I might find one verse that didn't say it that way, or maybe worded it differently. Matthew 10:39, Mark 2:35, and Luke 9:24 all tell us that the ones who would find life must first of all lose it. Paul makes matters worse. He speaks of our dying daily. We must imitate the wheat. That is the order of life, the new life that Jesus brings.

Unless something is dying, nothing is getting born. All good things grow out of life-and-death struggles and nothing that is new or truly good will come easy. Sometimes it is in the midst of terrible humiliation that we discover the fresh start.

Sometimes I try -- in an amateur way -- to do wood sculpture. This all began some years ago when a farmer gave me a walnut log. It was winter and to combat cabin fever I decided to be a sculptor. I knew nothing of tools, and certainly nothing of wood, but I thought I saw something in that walnut log, so I began to flail away, much like a lunatic in a lumber yard. I worked at it for a month or two and things were going well. I began to imagine that I had created a perfect form. I began to feel like I would be another Henry Moore.

One morning I looked at the wood and discovered a hair-line crack running from the base around the top. Each day the crack widened. No one had told me what happens to green walnut when it is cut. In a week or two the piece was terribly scarred with an ugly flaw. My perfect form had experienced humiliation.

I pitched it onto the woodpile. Later in the spring I looked at the wood again and wondered what would happen if I would follow the grain around the crack. By this time the crack was a half-inch wide. A most wondrous thing happened. The crack seemed to belong in the wood. I polished it, crack and all, and placed it in my office to remind myself not to cut into the wood when it is green.