What is the cost for giving new life? It can be very high. It can be death. Many of us know of someone whose mother died in childbirth.   Even when physical death is not involved, new life always without exception means that something must die. We give up old locations of residence when we move for a new job. We give up the single life when we marry. We give up many degrees of preference and convenience when we grow our families. These are all deaths.

And then there are the deaths that are forced upon us; the loss of a loved one; the marginalization that we experience as a result of our ethnic or class designation; the discrimination that we have to endure on account of our gender, sexuality or race. In our world today, we force death upon one another for so many reasons; power, privilege, domination, money, gratification, only to name a few.

Yet still, somehow new life comes. It’s not always quick to see or realize, but it comes inevitably. The universe tells us this. Our earth demonstrates this through its seasons and even daily. New life can come in many forms. Some may seem chosen. Others may seem spontaneous. Many times new life remains hidden until one day or moment we suddenly realize we are now living in newness.

In the immediate aftermath of one of the most intimate and painfully personal encounters that Jesus has during his sojourn on this earth, the plot is made against him. Jesus has just been with his beloved friends who have experienced the death of a loved one, Lazarus, and participated fully in the painful and exhausting process of helping someone come back to life, when today’s Gospel opens (Jn 11:45-56)

“What are we going to do?
This man is performing many signs.
If we leave him alone, all will believe in him,
and the Romans will come
and take away both our land and our nation.”
But one of them, Caiaphas,
who was high priest that year, said to them,
“You know nothing,
nor do you consider that it is better for you
that one man should die instead of the people,
so that the whole nation may not perish.”

The main historical storyline of Christianity has for the most part steered away from the radical outlaw nature of Jesus’ life. Because of Who he was and what he did, he was constantly harassed, hunted down, forced into hiding, and eventually arrested as a criminal and killed execution-style. This Life of Christ lives on today in the lives of all humanity – some of us playing the role of the Jewish leaders, some of us as the Roman presence, some of us as the disciples, some of us as those healed, and many of us as Jesus – the marginalized, the rejected, the imprisoned, the murdered, the healed, the heart-full, the merciful. And the roles change up from time to time. Somehow in all this, new life still emerges — through death, nonetheless, but still New Life!

It is hard for many of us to embrace the reality that whatever new life there is to come comes through a process of suffering and dying. This is true especially for those of us who fall into the privileged categories. It can mean gaining a realistic vision of the connection between convenience and blindness of the price-tag others pay for that convenience. It can be the suffering of letting go of or surrendering violent mindsets that obviously exclude and dehumanize others. It can also be the going through the pain and suffering that is inflicted upon you by another, not as a victim but as a prophet of nonviolent resistance radiating out transformative energies through endurance. It can take so many forms. In fact, real Newness most often comes in strange ad unexpected ways that can take our breath away and explode our worlds.

Mostly though, In the meantime, before we can jump into the newness that awaits us, we have to creatively die. This may sound strange, but there is a sense where when we can SEE what it is that confronts us in our circumstances, deep down in the depths of our selves hidden to our conscious lives even sometimes, we are capable of holding still, not denying, not reacting, holding, trusting, breathing, and allowing – whatever that invisible strength welling up from within – to protect us and carry us where we need to go. This is a moment of creativity – creatively dying into the very hope that something new is arising. It takes practice and courage to be able to see this way, creatively in the dark so to speak, but it can be done.   It is…near the desert…

So Jesus no longer walked about in public among the Jews,
but he left for the region near the desert,
to a town called Ephraim,
and there he remained with his disciples.

Sometimes we are no longer able to walk in public. It can be painful, and the reasons why may hurt and frighten us, but the region near the desert can still be a place inhabited by the Divine Support that we all have at what may seem the fringes of our heart. Indeed, this desert space is the very opening into the Love and Mercy that springs forth unceasingly up through whatever Life brings us. Waiting in uncertainty, yet certain of our Source, the darkness of birth need not frighten us.

My dwelling shall be with them;
I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.    (Ez 37:21-28)