A little while before his arrest, Jesus said to his gathered disciples, very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the

ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Now, the word in this

verse translated kernel of wheat is probably best rendered seed. That's how it's translated every other time Jesus uses it.

And on every other occasion,

he's not talking about a seed that sprouts a wheat stalk.

He's talking about a seed that sprouts a tree,

a mustard seed among the smallest of the mall

that sprouts a mustard tree among the largest.

The tree on which Jesus died served as a hint at the life within him that could not be taken.

And just before his disciples beheld the spectacle of his untakeable life,

he told us how to follow him into our own.

Jesus isn't only teaching us how he will defeat death,

but how to follow him into the same kind, dying to life as we made it, awakening to life as he

remade it. The Apostle Paul picks up this train of thought, but Christ has indeed been raised

from the dead the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. So when Jesus burst forth from

that tomb on Easter morning, he was first fruits? Exactly. Think of it like this. Along the west side of the Willamette River that cuts through the heart of Portland, there

stands a grove of cherry trees.

And in the Pacific Northwest, those are the first trees that flower each spring.

When the sky is still dark and the air is still cold, those trees burst into life so vibrant

that photographers every hour of the day document its promise.

In the Israeli desert of Jesus and his people, almond trees were the first to flower each spring.

And when Yahweh selects Jeremiah out of the exiled people as a voice for how God

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