A reading from the holy Gospel according John

Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover Feast came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and ask him, "Sir, we would like to Jesus." Philip went and to;d Andrew; then 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 love his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am, there also will my servant be. The Father will honor whoever serves me.

"I am troubled now. Yet, what should I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it and will glorify it again." The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder, but others said, "An angel has spoken to him." Jesus answered and said, "This voice did not come for my sake but for yours. Now is the time of judgement on this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself." He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.

The Gospel of the Lord.

By nature, we recoil at the thought of death, and love life. Under normal circumstances, we all wish to avoid death; in fact, in the face of sickness and threats of death, we seek to prolong our life. Normally, we try to escape suffering. When ill, we seek immediate healing. We all dread death. We fear extinction. That is why, when stricken with terminal cancer, for example, people are terrified; they feel shattered. They are horrified at the thought of dying. The reason for all this is that, consciously or unconsciously, we all wish to live forever. This is true even of those who do not believe in God. There is no untruth to the observation that faced with the fact that even death is inevitable, many people, often without explicitly intending to, immortalize themselves through various ways. Some write books. Others erect monuments. Still others sire children. To live forever is innate to human nature.

In today's Gospel (John 12:20-33), Jesus was confronted with death. And John does not hide Jesus' horror over it: "My soul is troubled now" (John 12:27). Which echoes Mark's portrait of Jesus' agony: "My heart is filled with sorrow to the point of death (Mark 14:34). Of course, John does not have an account of Jesus' agony in the garden, unlike the Synoptics, but the anguish and other elements of his agony are found in the Gospel. The statement, "what can I say? Save me from this hour?" (v. 27), really conveys the inner tension which Jesus suffers. This, of course, is quite ironic, even paradoxical, because when he came, Jesus went about doing good, healing all who were in the grip of the devil ( Acts 10:38). But when the Devil turned to him, he could not free himself from his grip. Thus his prayer, "save me" (John 12:27b). He prayed to be freed from the hour of his passion.

The point of the Gospel is this. Though Jesus cannot be saved from the hour, he triumphed over the natural shrinking from the horror of passion and death. The reason for this is that "it was for the purpose of bringing salvation that he came" (v. 27d), and this can be achieved only through suffering. He brought salvation because he obediently accepted the cross. Far from doing his own will (see Mark 14:36), he clung to God, for he was all that mattered. On account of this, salvation — or, in John's vocabulary, life — became possible. Thus Reading II: "In the days when he was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to God, who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Son through he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered, and when perfected, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him" (Heb 5:7-9). Also, by his suffering, Jesus showed to people who God is: God fulfills his promise of a new covenant (Jer 31:34, Reading I) to people who are the beneficiaries of Jesus' suffering.

This truth of salvation is akin to the situation of a woman in labor. The first time she is about to give birth, a woman is gripped by fear, and even by the fear of dying, but the thought of her husband whom she loves and who loves her, and her baby, makes her undergo it all. She at first may recoil at it; nonetheless, she submits to it. But through her labor, a new life is ushered into the world. A baby is born.

The same may be said of our life as Christians. To find eternal life, we need to undergo constant dying. We die to our selfishness, to our ambition to dominate others, acquire enormous wealth, and be number one. To do this, of course, is not easy, because, earthbound as we are, we tend to attach so much importance to self and its selfish cravings for power, wealth and honor. But in the long run, we find that these do not guarantee happiness, nor is one able to cling to power, wealth and honor forever. In the end, we discover that these have to go, leaving us disillusioned. There is much truth to Jesus' saying that "whoever would preserve his life would lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospel's will find it" (Mark 8:33). As a Christian, one has to suffer, even die, for Christ and his body, the Church. Then, new life will surely sprout. "Unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it produces much fruit" ( John 12:24-25). That is enough guarantee that one will live forever. Books can burn, monuments can crumble, generations can be obliterated, but the life that comes from suffering for the Gospel is the only thing that will remain forever.

Fr. Lope C. Robredillo

In a Medical point of view, this is the physical description:

The cross is placed on the ground and the exhausted man is quickly thrown backwards with his shoulders against the wood. The legionnaire feels for the depression at the front of the wrist. He drives a heavy, square wrought-iron nail through the wrist deep into the wood. Quickly he moves to the other side and repeats the action, being careful not to pull the arms too tightly, but to allow some flex and movement. The cross is then lifted into place.

The left foot is pressed backward against the right foot, and with both feet extended, toes down, a nail is driven through the arch of each, leaving the knees flexed.

The victim is now crucified...

As he slowly sags down with more weight on the nails in the wrists, excruciating fiery pain shoots along the fingers and up the arms to explode in the brain - the nails in the wrists are putting pressure on the median nerves. As he pushes himself upward to avoid this stretching torment, he places the full weight on the nail through his feet. Again he feels the searing agony of the nail tearing through the nerves between the bones of his feet. As the arms fatigue, cramps sweep through his muscles,knotting them deep relentless, and throbbing pain. With these cramps comes the inability to push himself upward to breathe. Air can be drawn into the lungs but not exhaled. He fights to raise himself in order to get even one small breath.

Finally, carbon dioxide builds up in the lungs and in the blood stream, and the cramps partially subsided. Spasmodically, he is able to push himself upward to exhale and bring in life-giving oxygen. Hours of limitless pain, cycles of twisting, joint-renting cramps, intermittent partial asphyxiation, searing pain as tissue is torn from his lacerated back as he moves up and down against rough timber. Then another agony begins: a deep, crushing pain deep in the chest as the pericardium slowly fills with serium and begins to compress the heart. It is now almost over. The loss of tissue fluids has reached a critical level. The compressed heart is struggling to pump heavy, thick, sluggish blood into the tissues. The tortured lungs are making frantic effort to gasp in small gulps of air. He can feel the chill of death creeping through his tissues. Finally, he allows his body to die.