CHRIST AS TRUE VINE

I John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

5th Sunday of Easter, April 28, 2024

Rev. Dr. Ritva  H. Williams

Welcome to episode 2 of “who is the Risen Christ for us today?” In episode 1, we learned that Christ is the Good Shepherd whose love is expressed in nourishing, guarding, guiding, and laying down their life for the sheep. As Christ’s followers, we too ought to lay down our lives for our neighbors in need. Christ the Good Shepherd, affirms the marginalized as essentially good and loving people.

This morning, Jesus draws on a common Mediterranean form of agriculture to illustrate our relationship with the Christ. The earliest evidence of cultivating grape vines dates back 8,000 years. These images show ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans harvesting the fruit of the vine, and stomping it to make wine. 

Vines are rooted in the earth, from which they draw water and nutrients up and out into the branches so they can grow and produce grapes. Excess water evaporates through the grape leaves. Through the millennia, vine growers have developed careful methods of pruning and trellising vines and their branches to maximize the production of grapes. 

Jesus presents the Christ as the “True Vine,” God as the farmer, and us as branches. God’s mission is to cultivate the vine and its branches to produce fruit. This involves pruning, cleansing, trellising, and removing branches. God applies this process to every branch. Even those that bear fruit get the same treatment so they will bear more fruit. Since bearing fruit is referenced five times in these verses, it must be really important. 

Another really important word is ‘abide,’ repeated eight times. To abide is to stay in a place, to take up permanent residence, to make oneself at home, e.g. to abide in the house of the Lord. Abide also means to keep on, continue, persist, or endure, as in “her love of music abided even after she lost her hearing.” 

Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you” (John 15:4). “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can produce nothing” (John 15:5). Abiding in Christ the True Vine is the only way we are able to bear fruit. But notice, that the Christ already abides in us. Christ takes up permanent residence in our hearts, spirits, souls when we are born into this world, a truth that is publicly affirmed in the sacrament of Holy Baptism. While Christ’s abiding in us a permanent and constant, it appears that our abiding in Christ is a matter of choice. When we remain faithfully attached we bear fruit. When we become disconnected from Christ the True Vine we bear no fruit. Bearing fruit is, therefore, entirely dependent on abiding in Christ. But what is the fruit that we produce when we abide? 

The answer to this question is found in our first scripture reading:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love is revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us … (1 John 4:7-10).

God is love. God is the source of love. God’s love is revealed in God’s Son — the Christ — who is sent into the world so that we might live through him. The Christ functions for us as the vine does in the vineyard, filling us, not with water and nutrients, but with God’s love.

In this painting by Sabrina J. Squires, called “The Love of God,” the tree and its fruit represent God’s love which is being showered on people of different races, genders and ages. The rainbow colors represent God’s excitement and awareness in creating diversity. The tree is large and all encompassing, showing that God’s love extends to all people.

We typically think of love as a human emotion, a feeling of deep affection for another person, or the experience of liking and enjoying something (like flowers or sports) very much. Let me suggest that our ordinary understanding of love is too small. In a recent article titled, “Love is the Masterpiece of Nature,” Mark Matousek writes:

Since ancient times, philosophers have suggested that love is an elemental force of nature …The power that drives the stars, they say, is the same force that compels the human heart. (August 21, 2023, psychologytoday.com)

In The Universal Christ, Father Richard Rohr lifts up the teaching of French Jesuit priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who insisted:

love is the very physical structure of the Universe … gravity, atomic bonding, orbits, cycles, photosynthesis, ecosystems, force fields, electromagnetic fields, sexuality, friendship, animal instinct, and evolution all reveal an energy that is attracting all things and beings to one another, in a movement toward ever greater complexity and diversity — and yet ironically also toward unification at ever deeper levels. This energy is quite simply love under many different forms (p. 69).

So we are surrounded by an elemental force of nature — an energy — that attracts and brings all things together. When we experience “love” as an attraction to another person or find ourselves passionately engaged with things in the world around us, we are participating in God’s love, the divine energy that fills all of creation and holds it all together. 

To borrow the words of one commentator, our scripture reading teaches us:

God’s love does not depend on our initiative or on our worthiness. We don’t have to reach out to God or even believe in God in order to be loved. We don’t have to clean up our act before God can love us. We don’t have to measure up to some standard in order to be lovable. No, God showers love on us whether we deserve it or not … Seeing ourselves as God’s beloved means seeing our sisters and brothers as God’s loved ones too. If we have come to know God’s love, we have seen for ourselves that it is unearned, undeserved, utterly free. Although God’s love is without conditions, it is not without consequences: God commands us to love one another as God has loved us … Such love can never originate with us. … (Judith Jones, May 3 2015; workingpreacher.org)

That takes us back to Christ the True Vine, pouring love into our lives directly through an abiding spiritual relationship, and indirectly through relationships with family, friends, neighbors and even the strangers we meet in everyday life. God’s love casts out fear, empowering  us to serve our neighbor in need, and equally as important enabling us to receive the service of our neighbor when we are in need.

Today as we give thanks for Christ the True Vine, let us pray. 

Christ, you are the vine.  We are your branches.  We are all part of one another.
I am rooted in you, your life flowing through me. In you I flourish.
It is not by my talent or capacity,  but your love in me, by which I bear fruit.
When I am wounded, your life renews me.
When I am weak, other branches sustain me.
When I lose my way, your hold on me restores me.
Your Spirit bears fruit in me, and I offer it to the world.
Prune in me what does not bear fruit, and nourish what does, by your grace.
You, the thriving vine,  I your love-bearing branch. Amen.