Cross with Wheat
Vanderbilt Divinity Library, 1960

My dear friends,

As we enter more deeply into Holy Week, the Gospel today brings us to the threshold of the mystery: the moment where Jesus turns toward the Cross not as an end, but as the great beginning. It is here that the words and symbols of the Gospel converge with the deepest truths of the spiritual path—the surrender of the false self, the blossoming of love, and the illumination of all beings.

The Greeks are outsiders, seekers from beyond the religious boundary of Israel. Their presence signals a profound shift: the Gospel is not for the few, but for all. Their arrival at this hour foreshadows the universal reach of Christ's compassion, echoing the Bodhisattva vow to liberate all beings without exception. It is as if the whole world is beginning to knock at the door of salvation.

“We wish to see Jesus.” This longing is the heart of every spiritual path. It is the cry of the soul seeking not information, but encounter; not doctrine, but presence. The Greeks' request is our own: to see with the eyes of the heart, to awaken to the face of the Beloved who liberates by love.

The disciples’ cooperation shows us how grace often works through relationship. Philip and Andrew do not act alone—they carry the seekers’ request together. This is the Sangha in action: the community of spiritual friends who carry others into the presence of the holy, just as a Bodhisattva carries beings across the ocean of suffering. As Atisha has said,

With the Greeks’ arrival, Jesus knows his hour has come—the sacred hour of glorification through self-offering. The “glory” he speaks of is not worldly splendor but divine radiance revealed through surrender. In the language of the path, this is the moment when the ego dissolves into the vast sky of Bodhicitta, the mind of limitless love, compassion, and wisdom.

The grain must fall. The ego must die. This paradox—death as the path to life—is the secret of the cross and of all true awakening. To “hate one’s life” is not self-contempt, but the release of clinging to the separate self. This is the opening of the hand of grasping, so that divine fruit may be borne for the healing of the world.

To serve Christ is to walk his path—to share his descent into suffering and his ascent into light. It is to follow him into the places of wounding and become a vessel of mercy there. The servant’s reward is not escape, but communion—“where I am, there will my servant be.”

Jesus’ troubled soul shows us that even the awakened one feels the tremor of the abyss. Yet he does not flee. His resolve is the courage of the Bodhisattva: to enter suffering knowingly, willingly, for the sake of others. The voice from heaven affirms this path—not to save him from it, but to glorify love through it.

The “ruler of this world” is the grasping mind, the delusion of separateness. By embracing the cross, Jesus dismantles the very structure of domination and fear. The thunder is the sound of awakening; the judgment is the unveiling of what has always been true: that love is stronger than death.

To be “lifted up” is both crucifixion and exaltation. In being raised on the cross, Jesus becomes the axis mundi—the tree at the center of the world—drawing all beings into the field of compassion. This is the magnetism of bodhicitta: the awakened heart that attracts, embraces, and redeems.

Here is Jesus’ final exhortation: do not delay. Walk in the light now, and let it make you luminous. The light is bodhicitta, the awakened mind of love that guides the feet and warms the heart. To become children of light is to become vessels of divine love, radiating peace into a world that groans for healing.

As we draw near to the cross this week, may we not only behold it, but follow. May the grain of our egos fall into the soil of Christ’s mercy and there die to all that separates us from love. And may the fruit that rises from that death be a harvest of light for all beings.