Today's readings: Jeremiah 31, 31-34; Hebrews 5, 7-9; John 12, 20-33.

We are nearing the 'Great Week'. Good Friday lasts until the world ends. The story of Jesus crucified is a story of utter violence which unfortunately continues to be perpetuated in history. The way we live and the way things are going, seem at times to promise further darkness to come.

We perceive our lives as being fragmented. This is related to the way we perceive our lives over time. In the first place, there is never enough time, it seems, to accommodate all the tasks we want to undertake. And in the second place, we make ourselves miserable over this because we value ourselves in terms of what we accomplish.

But love for life cannot rest on a lie. Only love is stronger than death and evil. The way of Jesus surely contradicts our humanism, and at times, even our search for wholeness. Jesus invites us to face the truth of our lives. And this contradicts the dominant ethos.

In today's Gospel, the appearance of some Greeks who wanted to see Jesus is very significant. It calls to mind St Paul's words when he speaks of the preaching of Christ crucified, referring to the Jews who demand miracles and the Greeks who look for wisdom.

When Jesus changed water into wine at Cana of Galilee he told his mother, "my hour has not come yet". Now he proclaims, "the hour has come". It is the hour of his glorification, which was not meant to be the climax of a success story. It was to be achieved through his passion and death, through his humble submission to the will of the Father.

This proclamation that "the hour has come", occurs in the middle of John's Gospel at the point when Jesus is about to start his journey towards Jerusalem. We are not told whether these Greeks actually spoke to Jesus. But since they were only looking for wisdom, for them, Jesus was literally talking nonsense. His words on losing life to find it, and on dying to live, were foolish for the Greeks. They still sound foolish for so many today.

This is the logic of the Gospel. It is the logic of the grain of wheat that must die to yield a rich harvest. It is a constant invitation in our violent and wounded world to hear the inner voice of love that can still make so much sense in our personal and collective journeys through so much anguish.

But for people who want to rationalise and understand, it doesn't make sense to die to oneself, to lose one's life, to hate one's life, just for the sake of keeping it for eternal life. The politics of our daily way of life centres around a different creed that always seeks to make us affirm: Be yourself. Efficiency and competitiveness are what mostly drives society today and what shapes the politics of modern living. Yet we can hardly bear the suffering that all this is being perpetuated in our societies. The higher the standards, the more people fall by the margins of society.

We're all geared up to live life in fast forward mode here and now. It's not, as was commonplace in olden times, life after death that gives sense and meaning to this side of the coin. It's the other way round, we want life here and now to make sense and be meaningful.

The Greeks in today's Gospel stand for people who were not Jews, did not belong to God's chosen people. They searched for wisdom just as today we want to rationalise and understand everything. Many people today are bystanders watching society re-enact today all that happened in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, while asking whether all this makes sense. Jesus faces his hour of apparent failure. Even the crucified is a coin with two sides, depending on the standpoint from where you look at it. It can be the manifestation of supreme failure or of supreme victory. It is not for devotees that the crucified is lifted up, but as a powerful eye-opener for the dynamics that continue to shape our daily living. Jesus gives the right perspective to measure in truth what amounts to loss and what to gain in life.