Well, it is just a matter of a few weeks now before we celebrate Holy Week and Easter Sunday. It’s also a time at Mercy Home that I really enjoy very much, as we prepare for the spring. One of the things that I love about both of our campus, where the boys live and the girls live, is we have beautiful vegetable gardens during the summertime. And in about a week’s time, our young people, our children, will gather and they will take tiny seeds. They’ll take tomato seeds and basil seeds and bean seeds, and they’ll place them in dirt, and they will cover them over with soil, they’ll water them, and they’ll put them in our learning centers for the seeds to germinate. And interestingly enough, every year, it happens. The seeds begin to pop through the soil, and begin to grow, and when they grow large enough, we take them out into the gardens, and we plant them, and we see in August and in September the beautiful fruit that they yield, fruit a hundredfold.

It’s how it works. A seed falling into the ground, dying, rising and producing much fruit. That is what Jesus uses as an image, as a foreshadowing of his own death, as we move as a pilgrim people during the Lenten season towards his passion, his death and resurrection. He will die so that he can rise and bring life to all. There’s another kind of dying that we do, dying to ourselves. During the liturgy today, I’m so proud of the Knights of Columbus, who celebrate this liturgy here at Mercy Home. They are a group of men who constantly are dying to themselves, surrendering their ego so that they can bring life to others. True, they are some of the most charitable, giving, good human beings that I know. They call no attention to themselves, they don’t feed their ego. Rather, out of a sense of following the gospel, they do what they can to help sister and brother in need.

That’s what dying to ourselves means, so that we might bring life and goodness to others. That’s what the Knights of Columbus do so beautifully, without ever calling attention to themselves. As we gather to celebrate Eucharist on this, the fifth Sunday of Lent, as we gather around the table of the Lord, we celebrate the paschal mystery: dying in death, rising in life, being nourished with Christ, the Bread of Life.