Reflection for the Fourth Sunday of Easter by Franciscan Action Network Executive Director Michele Dunne, OFS
This reflection was originally posted in our April 16 newsletter
What Jesus says about himself and his purpose in the passage from John’s Gospel (10:11-18) for the Fourth Sunday of Easter commands my attention: “This is why the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.” I lay down my life in order to take it up again; what a statement! And it was extremely controversial at the time. The Gospel relates that Jesus’ Jewish audience was divided in their reactions, some of them saying he must be insane.
Certainly, Jesus’ statement could be understood after his death and resurrection as a simple statement of what was going to occur, and that it applied to him only. Yet I wonder if it is meant to apply to us as well. A bit later in John’s Gospel, after Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he said something strikingly similar: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit…” (John 12:24). This is generally interpreted to apply to all of us, not just to Jesus.
What does it mean for me to lay down my life…in order to take it up again? An image that comes to my mind was suggested by a Franciscan friar during a talk I heard about the meaning of profession as a Secular Franciscan. He suggested that on profession day, each of us imagine laying our body across the altar as a symbol of preparedness to make any sacrifice God would ask of us. Here is my life, God; do with it what you will. I will take it up again as a new life, not mine alone anymore but mine in you and given over to your will.
It was not easy for Jesus to lay down his life—remember the Garden of Gethsemane – even if he knew that he would take it up again. Laying down his life involved enduring public humiliation, excruciating pain, and abandonment by his friends. Yet, as Peter says in the reading from Acts of the Apostles (4:8-12), it was exactly because Jesus was rejected by the leaders of his time that he was able to become the cornerstone of the new Incarnational reality that God was building. How impossible it must have been to see that paradox at the time of the Crucifixion, and how the miracle of the Resurrection and descent of the Holy Spirit transformed Jesus’ followers. Clearly the Peter of Acts—boldly delivering the good news of Jesus despite the cost, feeling the Spirit coursing within him and calling him to continue Jesus’ healing ministry—was a transformed person. He had laid down his life and taken it up again.
There are so many ways in which I might be called to lay down my life. I might be called to lay down my life by surrendering my narrow concerns, time, comfort, and even perhaps short-term freedom to stand in solidarity with people thousands of miles away in Gaza (or Sudan, Somalia, Ukraine, Yemen…), who are being killed, maimed, and starved by the thousands. I might be called to lay down my life by making a personal sacrifice from my abundance to lighten the load that my neighbors enduring poverty are bearing. On this Earth Day 2024, perhaps I am called to lay down my life by taking off my blinders to learn about environmental injustice in my community or by taking inconvenient steps to stop consuming plastics that are choking the earth, our beautiful home. And when I have laid down my life, I will take it up again in Christ, following God’s will.
Michele Dunne, OFS
Executive Director, Franciscan Action Network
Acting Franciscan 
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