From Tragedy to Triumph

N. T. Wright explains the seed analogy that Jesus used in John 12. “Jesus’s death will be like sowing a seed into the ground. It will look like a tragedy, the large-scale, fully grown version of the tiny ‘tragedy’ that a small boy feels at planting one of his largest and best ‘conkers’ in the ground and never seeing it again. In fact, it will be a triumph: the triumph of God’s self-giving love, the love that looks death itself in the face and defeats it by meeting it voluntarily, on behalf not just of Israel but of the whole world, the world represented by these ‘Greeks’” (N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 11–21 [London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004], 29–30, Logos).