Last week I wrote about roots, so it’s only right that this week I write about seeds.
In last week’s post, I argued that the roots of a plant grow out of the anxieties of the past—that the memories and histories of drought or scarcity or plenty or flood inform the ways plants send their roots outward or downward, and the ways they anchor themselves to the earth. Roots are the present’s way of living out the lessons of the past—adaptations won from hard experience and the struggle for survival.
Seeds, on the other hand, are radical expressions of hope. Seeds are a plant’s ways of placing a bet on a future they might not live to see. If roots are the way plants respond to the traumas of the past, then seeds are the ways plants choose to believe in the possibilities of life beyond themselves.
Paul could be quite poetic when he was in the mood, and the epistle reading in the lectionary this week is a great example. And as for what you sow, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:37, you do not sow the body that is to be but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen and to each kind of seed its own body. This is true. The grain of wheat bears little resemblance to the stalk that will grow from it, and the pits of a peach or an avocado or an olive don’t look much like the plants that will spring out of them. The tiny seed of a thistle, borne aloft by a tuft of wispy down, looks nothing like the forbidding prickle-stemmed stalk that produced it. In making a seed, a plant abstracts itself, creating something wholly different from itself that also still contains its essence—its genetic information. The plant does this in the hope—in the expectation—that the seed will find a life of its own, a life beyond what the plant itself has known or is capable of knowing. A seed is a way of fostering life beyond the self.
In this passage, Paul is writing about resurrection. Already by the time we get to the beginning of the lectionary passage, in verse 35, Paul has been writing about death and resurrection for the whole chapter. Paul had the fortune (and misfortune) of being one of the first people in the Christian tradition to think through some of its thorniest theological questions, and this passage reads like Paul and everyone else were working through things as they went along. What is resurrection anyway, they seem to have asked themselves, and what do we mean when we talk about immortality? It’s a good question. Resurrection seems to push against all the evidence we have about how the world works; resurrection makes a mockery of the order of things. We are born, we live, we die, and so too it seems with all living things, from people to trees to stray dogs to the mushrooms that spring up after the rain. But, Paul proclaims earlier in the chapter in verses 3 and 4, Christ died…and he was buried, and he was raised. (Notice that here, as in most cases in Paul’s writing, Jesus didn’t rise, but he was raised by God. It’s important to Paul to protect the agency of God in supernatural matters). Two paragraphs later, in 15:20, Paul begins to circle around a metaphor: Jesus is “the first fruits of those who have died.”
Fruit is nothing but seeds dressed up in burial clothes, and Paul seizes on the image. Fruit is meant to die, and in fact by the time a fruit falls from the plant it is usually already dead. Strawberries or chestnuts or kernels of corn are cast off by a plant or offered to grazing animals, disconnected from root and stem, in the hopes that they will catch in the earth and begin a new life, replete with new possibilities of finding sustenance and safety. Fruit contains the seeds of resurrection, but it has to pass through death on the way there.
It is sown in dishonor, Paul writes, it is raised in glory. Seeds sprout and emerge from the ground as something much more than how they entered. It is sown in weakness, he says, and it is raised in power. Somewhere in the ground, death turns into life. It is sown a physical body, Paul continues, clearly on a roll, and it is raised a spiritual body, and here is where he is in danger of outrunning his metaphor. A seed dies and sprouts into a plant, Paul says, but a body dies and rises into a spiritual body. What does this mean? Paul never gets very specific about it, other than to say that just like Adam gave rise to a history of physical bodies, Jesus will give rise to a lineage of spiritual bodies. Is a spiritual body like a plant germinating in the ground? Is it like the first leaves pushing through the thawing earth in springtime? Whatever it is, Paul is enthralled with the difference between what goes into the ground and what comes out again. A seed goes into the ground, and what comes out is imperishability and immortality, as he says just beyond the lectionary reading in verses 52-54. The seed is changed.
This passage is often read at funerals, where it is meant to comfort people who are mourning. At the moment of death, this passage is trying to reassure us, we are transmuted into something worthy of eternity. And it’s a good thing, too, we funeral-goers are meant to understand. As Paul writes in verse 50, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Death is the doorway to eternal life, we have heard from many a funeral officiant, and the ones who have died have simply passed through the door before us.
I find myself wishing Paul had played out his metaphor differently and therefore described resurrection in a different way. What I find remarkable about seeds is not the way they transfigure themselves into plants, but the way they give themselves over so wholly to a future they won’t live to see. A seed dies, as Paul would agree, but I am not so sure that it dies for itself and its own future imperishability. Instead, I think seeds die in the service of hope. They die for the possibility of life, but not the possibility of their own life. Seeds die for the next generation and the one after that. Knowing that nothing and no one lives forever, seeds sow the future.
What would happen if we thought about resurrection that way—as a radical act of hope that happens when we give ourselves to the future? What would happen if we shifted our theologies of resurrection away from self-preservation and self-transformation, and towards contributing to a flourishing world of hereafter that we might not live to see? Then resurrection changes from a personal event to a political act—away from a retrenchment of the self and towards an emptying of the self into the world to come. Resurrection might do what seeds do. Resurrection might offer the past’s resources to the future, without reservation or any strings attached. Jesus, in that view, was the first fruit to fall from the tree—but he was by no means the last.
That’s not the direction Paul took the metaphor, and he had his reasons. For starters, Paul was apocalyptic, and he thought that the world itself would soon end, or otherwise change completely. There isn’t much room for a full-fledged earthly future in that way of thinking, so Paul described the future as a transformation away from dust and earth and into spirit and heaven. For Paul, seeds in the ground were like bodies dying to God; they were sites and signs of a wondrous and complete transformation.
But a hundred generations later—the second coming still pending and the apocalypse looking less godly by the day—I find myself wanting something different from my own resurrection. When I die, I want to die like a seed dies, as an endowment for a future I won’t live in. I don’t care much about my own transformation into spirit or my own persistence in some heaven, but I do want to offer myself to whatever cycles of life and growth will come after me. I do want my body and my spirit—such as they are—to be useful to the project of abundant life, or at the very least to not get in the way. If a seed falls and dies so that something new can come to life, and if Jesus was the first fruit to fall, then resurrection might simply be a way to talk about what it’s like to give one’s self away with a reckless and absolute hope.
When the nights grow longer and the air turns cold, the bright flowers of thistles turn to brown seedheads and release their small seeds into the wind on thistledown sails. The seeds ride the wind until they find a place to lodge in the soil. They wait there for the strengthening sunlight and soft rains of spring, sending roots into the ground and stems into the air, and by midsummer their bright new flowers swell with new seeds tipped with new thistledown, ready to take their own flights. What better kind of resurrection could there be?
Insightful and poetic! Thank you
So good!