Today you
can get in your car or on your bicycle and travel in almost any direction from this
place and before long you will see a sight that would have been very familiar
to Jesus. Wherever in Israel the land
was even half-way arable, wherever people were settled, it would have been one
of the tell-tale signs of spring to see the buds breaking through the bark of
the grape vines, the first, glossy leaves and vigorous new shoots bursting out
of the old wood.
In the
time-line of John’s Gospel Jesus speaks the words we read today in the spring,
on the night before the Passover. It is
the night of his betrayal, the night before his passion and death. And Jesus is preparing his disciples for what
is about to happen, but also for what is going to come after. Facing darkness, fear, the pain of death,
Jesus speaks words about life. He
invites them to imagine a vine, green and vibrant, sending out shoots and
tendrils and leaves in all directions. It
draws water and minerals from the deep darkness of the earth; it breathes in carbon
dioxide and nitrogen from the air; it receives light and warmth from the sun;
and it takes them all— the earth, the water, the air, and the fire, and it transforms
them into its own life.
But the vine
that Jesus speaks of is not alive only in a biological sense. “I am the true vine,” he says, and
that word “true” is there to tell us that he is talking about life par excellence. Don’t be fooled by the commonplace nature
of the symbol, the vine that grows in the hundreds and thousands and millions
in the valleys and on the hillsides—the life that is in this vine is the creative power of God. It is life ordered by wisdom, it is life in
harmony with the heart/mind of God, it is bliss, and truth, and knowledge, and
purpose and meaning. Most of all it is
love.
For this
life is a life that is shared. The life
of the true vine is the life that Jesus shared with his disciples when he was
with them as teacher, as master, as servant, and as friend. It is the new life that he will take up again
after he has laid his life down for them.
And the whole purpose of the life of the vine is to bear fruit. But it cannot bear fruit on its roots. It cannot bear fruit on its stem. It can only bear fruit on its branches. “I am the vine,” says Jesus, “and you are the branches.” What he is telling his disciples in this moment
is not merely that his life cannot be overcome by death, but that his new life
will be in them. It will be their life, and the fruit that they
bear, the way their lives are brought
to fulfillment, that will reveal the full glory of who he is.
That is what it really means to be Jesus’
disciple. Not just that love him. Not just have faith in him. Not just that we study and remember and apply
his teachings. But that through loving
him, through faith in him, through keeping his commands, we should abide in him,
and allow him to abide in us, so that we are his branches. We are his disciples when the love that he
bears towards us, brings forth fruit in our lives.
Now you may
have noticed something missing from this teaching. There is no code of conduct described here.
There are no prescribed steps of transformation. There are no liturgical instructions, or principles
of church governance. There is not even
any mention of church attendance. And
this should tell us something. Could our
life in Christ really be so simple?
Could it be as simple as it says in the 1st letter of John?— “We
love because he first loved us,” and “if we love one another, God lives in us.”
Why isn’t
that good news for us? Why don’t we want
a path that clear, that simple, that direct?
Well, I think the parable of the vine has some clues for us about that.
I was a
row-crop farmer for a few years in my twenties, which was a wonderful thing to
be, but there was a kind of satisfaction that I never even knew was missing
from that experience until I started working with trees. There are some fruit trees in San Francisco
that I pruned and tended for almost ten years and over that time I developed a close
relationship with those plants. It’s a
special kind of work because you make your cuts, taking out a limb here,
thinning out some branches there, with an idea of how you want to the plant to
grow, but then it’s up to the tree. You
come back in the spring and you see what it does with the work that you did,
and sometimes it turns out just like you imagined it, and sometimes it’s a
surprise. Then you have to adjust your
vision, and work with what the tree gives you, and slowly, over years, something
beautiful and fruitful emerges. Something
that the two of you, gardener and plant, have done together.
But we want
a God who is in charge of everything, or of nothing of all. We want either a God who is in control of every
aspect of our lives, and who we can blame when things go wrong, or a God who
blesses us from a safe distance and maybe catches us when we fall really,
really far, but who basically leaves us alone. But Jesus says, “I am the true vine, and my
Father is the vinegrower,” and that means that the God who Jesus calls “Father”
is one who works with us—removing a
branch here, tying up a shoot there, thinning out some leaves now and again --but
also giving us our freedom, letting us do the good, hard work of becoming
ourselves. I think that for most of us
the thought that God could, on the one hand, be so interested in our lives, and
on the other hand, have that much respect for us and trust in our ability to
grow into something beautiful, is just hard to accept.
And there’s
another reason why the simplicity of life in the true vine is daunting for
us. Because the primary work of the
vinedresser is to cut things away. She restricts
the young plant’s growth, so that it develops a strong, open structure. She removes suckers and excess vegetation, letting
in air and sunlight and pollinating insects, channeling all the energy of the
plant into the ripening fruit. But we
don’t like to be pruned. We don’t want
to let go of all the many possibilities that could have been or might yet be. We don’t want to accept the shape that God
has given to our flourishing. We don’t
want to have to keep asking ourselves, “What are we hanging on to that no
longer serves us, that is just taking up energy that could be better used to
make fruit?”
And yet if
we turn that around, I think there is also a great promise here. Jesus seems to be saying that if we put all our
focus on the fruiting, if we keep looking for the places in our lives and the
lives of our communities where there are flowers blooming, where the immature
grapes are already forming, God will take care of removing the fruitless
branches for us. There may be a “little
pinch” as the dentist likes to say, but it will be over quickly, and the wound
will heal. And the momentary pain of the
lost branch will be forgotten in the joy of harvest, in the abundance of rich,
sweet wine. Such is the life of the
resurrection—not life without pain, or loss, or sacrifice—but life that no
longer fears these things as punishment.
Life trusting in the love that gave it life, abiding in that love, as
one fruitful branch of an indestructible vine.
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