John 15:1-8
April 29, 2018
I.
When Jesus refers to himself as “the true vine,” he means to distinguish himself from a particular false vine. This was the elaborate image of a vine that was carved into the facade of the Temple in Jerusalem, which anyone who had ever been there remembered. Apparently, it was quite impressive.
Jesus is saying that true faith and real spirituality is based on him, not the accepted, traditional, established religious institution. That fake vine was fruitless. It did not produce the forgiveness it claimed. It did not bear fruit in new, eternal life with and in God. The Temple itself was a big, expensive tourist attraction, paid for by crushing taxes and forced labor imposed on the people by an evil king named Herod, who was installed by the conquering Romans. Indeed, it had been reduced to a mere marketplace of swindling and profiteering.
But in the place of this barren monstrosity, Jesus presents himself as the true vine, the One planted by God. It would be a ridiculously conceited and self-serving claim, if he couldn’t back it up. If he can’t show that following and trusting in him actually does result in the new life of forgiveness and love he promises, then he is no better than the corrupt Temple.
That’s why the Lord has to talk about the pruning of the vine. God removes and throws into the fire every branch that does not bear fruit. When we look at Christianity and it doesn’t seem to be working very well in producing good people, it is because it has too many dead, fruitless branches: Those who claim to be connected to him, who bear the name “Christian,” yet whose lives show none of the fruit of discipleship, who indeed, live in ways unrelated to Jesus’ teachings and life. They are the ones who make Christianity seem no more spiritually fruitful than any other pompous, false religious institution. It seems to be just another whitewashed tomb, like the Temple: All talk and spectacle, with no real results.
The church in our time has been too often reduced to a bloated, self-serving, rich, powerful, superficially attractive but ultimately empty institution. Like the Temple, churches have been corrupted by money, power, and popularity. Over the centuries, churches have been apologists for war, injustice, slavery, torture, and the authority of the ruling elite. Thus churches lost nearly all their moral authority. They became little more than the official, approved cheerleaders for nationalism, and particular economic and moral orders. Like the Temple, the church was not a real “vine,” but a dead graven image, a counterfeit vine, standing more for the preservation of an unjust and violent status quo, than for any kind of new, transformed, redeemed life in God’s Spirit. We fed people the empty calories of self-serving sentimentalities, while fearing and fleeing any talk of transformation, hope, liberation, or healing.
II.
So when Jesus says that God “removes every branch… that bears no fruit,” he could be talking about the church in our time. For God is indeed removing many fruitless branches from the vine these days. Presbyteries spend more energy over closing churches than cultivating them. Churches pay more attention to the members they are losing, than to feeding the members they have with the word. Christians want things to stay the same or go back to what they used to know, but they see no need to deepen their connection to Jesus through Bible study or spiritual practices.
Indeed, Jesus implies that it is the word itself that he has spoken that is doing the cutting! Which is part of the dynamic here because Jesus’ teachings are alarmingly radical, demanding, and revolutionary; they challenge all our establishment and conventional thinking; they undermine and reject every rationalization of the normal social, political, and economic order. He wants this all replaced with what he calls the Kingdom of God, and its economics of sharing, its morality of forgiveness, and its politics of non-violence. We knew that we were not living up to his word, so we tended to withhold, ignore, and water it down. Of course we’re not going to preach that stuff, of course we’re going to prefer the fake, flashy, golden vine on the facade of the Temple to the true One who demands costly repentance and difficult discipleship.
So we are left in a time when God cuts off branch after branch, and limb after limb, till we have to wonder where it will end. Like when we prune the dead branches off of a tree, cutting it back until we hit living, green wood, we have to ask at this point if finally any productive, potentially fruitful part of us will ever be found.
The point, for a grape vine as for the church, is not getting more branches and sprouting more leaves, it is bearing fruit. For a vine this means good, juicy, sweet grapes that can be made into fine wine. For the church the “fruit" is our actions. Good fruit means good actions, actions that reflect and express the life of Jesus.
Just as the wine it produces does not benefit the vine at all, so also the church cannot be about its own growth and survival. A great deal of the energy we have sunk into the various techniques and strategies for church growth, right up to our present infatuation with being “adaptive,” has been wasted. It has been about supposedly preserving the vine, while ignoring the production of grapes. Which is to say, maintaining an institution while not changing our lives and behavior.
The vinegrower may extend the vines and expand the vineyard. But this happens because the vine is doing what it is supposed to do, which is produce good grapes. The vine that does produce good grapes is one that the farmer will allow to grow. The vine that does not produce good grapes will be cut back. If necessary it will be uprooted and destroyed altogether. The grapes are the point. God wants the church to produce the good fruit of people whose lives express in their actions Jesus’ values of humility, compassion, forgiveness, and love.
III.
This happens not when we seek to grow, but when we are plugged in to Jesus Christ, who is the true vine. When his energy flows into and through us, and we are alive with his life of prayer and service, then we are bearing fruit and become branches worth keeping. That’s how the vine grows. Not by trying to grow. Not by adapting to a changed environment. But when our actions are based on and fed by the living energy of Jesus Christ. We experience real growth when we receive the energy of God and let it shape and form our actions.
This is what the church has to be about. We have to be a place where people experience the living Presence of Jesus Christ. This is where we come to plug in to the true vine, the real source of spiritual power. This is where we learn his life of acceptance and forgiveness. This is where we come to see for ourselves that the new life he talks about, the joy and the peace of trusting in him, is true. It is real. It works.
We become fruitful branches by what are traditionally called “the means of grace,” which are the three main ways God’s energy comes to us and starts flowing through us. All three of these are implied in this passage.
The first is the Word, Jesus Christ, whom we know in Scripture, where he shows us his life and gives us commandments, summed up in the commandment to love one another.
The second is the sacraments — Baptism and the Lord’s Supper — in which we are symbolically reborn and then actually fed with Jesus’ Body and Blood and so become him.
And the third is prayer. Jesus says, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” Prayer is this asking, based on our following and identifying with Jesus Christ.
These three are like the prongs of an electrical plug. Connected and engaged in these three conduits of divine power, we are charged and enabled to produce and bear the good fruit of changed lives. For when we are reshaped and regrounded by God’s grace in these three ways, we are brought into touch with our true selves. The false, ego-centric selves we think we are fall away, and we become awake and enlightened by our true selves, represented in the true humanity we share with Jesus. Through his humanity we also come to participate in his divine nature.
Our actions change from an orientation towards selfishness to generosity. Instead of being obsessed with consuming and gaining, we are all about shining with goodness and peace in the world. Instead of being motivated by fear and anger, even to the point of hatred, we are motivated by the love God pours into our hearts, expressed in a deep trust in Jesus, and a certain hope in the future he gives to us.
IV.
So we always have a choice. We can keep trying to prop up, restore, fund, polish, preserve, and otherwise maintain the superficial, artificial vine on the facade of the Temple, representing a doomed religious institution. We can keep pumping our resources into keeping things going, doing what we have always done, and wishing things could be the way they used to be. We can keep sinking our energy into nostalgia and fantasy.
Or we could see how the life and energy of Jesus Christ flows into and through us by participating in those means of grace, and allowing the good fruit of God’s future to be produced in us.
When we are inwardly formed by the Word, fed by the sacrament of his Body and Blood, and inspired by God’s living breath in prayer and contemplation, the fruit of justice and peace will be done in and through us. And God’s goodness and truth will be realized with and within us.
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