"Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience," (Col 3:12)

Jn 12: 24-26

Jesus said to his disciples: "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, 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."

Meditating on today's Gospel, we can understand a difference between our thinking and God’s thinking. In our thinking, profit comes from what we gain, we multiply, while with God, profit consists in losing, in dying. God has programmed our lives in such a way that time moves forward, towards death, and then jumps to eternity. Dying is thus inevitably written into our fate. You cannot achieve any spiritual fruit by yourself in your spiritual life. For this, God's help is needed, in the form of grace, which comes to man when, forgetting about himself, he entrusts himself completely to God, when he begins to die to himself, his desires, instead of nurturing them. God hid life in death, which is confirmed by the cross of Christ, on which He died to bring life to us. The fruit of the cross became the first fruit of salvation, from which all people can draw strength to become similar to Jesus when they sacrifice themselves. However, it is impossible to achieve anything in the spiritual life without becoming like Jesus, and therefore also accepting His cross with everything it brings, including dying. We are therefore faced with a choice: either to die for God, sacrificing our selfishness and gain eternal life, or to live for ourselves, satisfying ourselves, but condemning ourselves to eternal death. Because my dying for God is my voluntary decision, not an obligation. Jesus deliberately uses the conditional tense to emphasize that self-sacrifice is an individual decision of each man who can respond to God's love in the same way by sacrificing himself as Jesus gave himself to us, or by staying with himself, despising Christ's redemptive love. Everything is a matter of what kind of life we want: eternal life or rather this earthly life. Jesus does not equate these lives, for eternal life is much more important than this world. Whoever pursues this world will lose his eternity. And he who runs towards eternity will leave this world behind but will gain a much more beautiful and important world in which he will enjoy God, and God will enjoy him.

Father Marcin Cwierz, OSPPE

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"Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience," (Col 3:12)