John
15.1-8
‘I am the true vine, and my Father is
the gardener’ says Jesus to his disciples on the eve of his arrest
and crucifixion. To this point in the
bible the vine has always been associated with Israel, the covenant people of
God. And all the OT texts chastise the
nation for not bearing fruit as God expects.
Jesus is the true vine. Just as sap runs through the vine and into
the branches to produce grapes, so all life flows through him and then through
us, the little branches, in order to bear fruit. Well, that should be what happens.
‘I am the true vine, and my Father is
the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears
no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it
will be even more fruitful.’ I’m no gardener but I get the need for pruning.
You lop off branches that are
unproductive and just waste energy. You
try to produce a plant that is open to the light and not tangled in on
itself. The gardener lovingly cleans the
vine in order to produce the best possible grapes.
Jesus said to the disciples: ‘You are already clean because of the
word I have spoken to you.’ No
doubt there was more pruning to do but at that stage certain things had already
been cut away –some goals, some wrong ambitions perhaps.
‘Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit
by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you
remain in me.’ Here I prefer the AV or the new English Standard Version:
‘Abide in
me, and I in you.’
‘Remain’ is too thin, too static. It feels like ‘stay put’ or ‘hang
around’. Whilst to ‘abide’ means to
‘make our home’ in Jesus and to let Jesus make his home in us. It’s more
dynamic
I think ‘abiding’ has more the sense of
a full, personal commitment. Like Ben Quash's thought that the best description comes in the
Book of Ruth where she expresses her loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi: ‘Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you.
Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my
people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be
buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even
death separates you and me.’
Remain in me, abide in me, is to make
our home in Jesus and to let Jesus make his home in us; it’s a place of
presence and rest, of mutual friendship, a source of life and creativity.
‘I am the vine; you are the branches.’ This is a call to radical discipleship. ‘If you remain in me (abide in me) and I in you, you will
bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.’
Jesus asks us to surrender our own will
and to recognise our dependence upon him.
He asks us to relinquish control of our lives and let him live in
us. The US theologian Stanley Hauerwas
says that the Christian life ought always to be a ‘life lived out of
control’. Quite what that would mean for
you I leave you to ponder; my point here is that abiding is not just about our
own efforts.
Also let’s be aware that the ‘you’ here
is a plural ‘you’ in the Greek. ‘You lot
are the branches.’ So, it’s not just
about us as individual Christians but us as a church. We have fruit to bear together, as a body –
what does it look like?
Branches that decide to go it alone,
that try living without the life-giving sap of the vine, soon wither and die,
they are good for nothing. ‘If you do not
remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such
branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.’
The message should be clear. We are all to remain in the body, in the
community that loves, worships and serves Jesus as Lord. You can’t go it alone. And we must be people of prayer and worship,
in touch, in tune with Jesus, knowing him and being known by him.
That sharp warning of the futility of
life without him is now accompanied with the most extraordinary promise: ‘If you abide in
me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done
for you.’ If you’re like me
you’ll look at a promise like that and conclude ‘I don’t yet know the first thing about abiding!’ That is not my experience of prayer. My only
deduction is – there is an awful lot of pruning that needs to be done before
I’ve let go and let God take control.
Finally Jesus says: ‘This is to my Father’s glory, that you
bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.’ Jesus
offers these words to his disciples on the eve of his arrest and execution. In the terrible hours ahead and in the
confusions of the days to come they will be words of great hope. In spite of
everything the disciples will flourish.
John will record these words in his gospel for a church that may feel
abandoned – thrown out of the synagogues and scattered. They are experiencing savage cuts but they
will produce much fruit. These are words
of great hope.
What about us today? We may be feeling cut down or severely pruned
– as we experience life’s tragedies, great and small. The personal disappointments and losses, the
terrible reports of death and destruction and abuse that fill our news reports…
We may not be able to sense or believe
that such afflictions have happened for a purpose or that they herald a bright
future but we can hold on to Jesus’ promise that we can still flourish, we can
still be fruitful branches united to the vine.
His life can still flow from him and
into us and through us, for the good of others.
No matter what happens Jesus’ promise remains: ‘YOU LOT - If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear
much fruit.’
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