Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year B; Breen Philips Hall.
Last week, we heard from Jesus’ Good
Shepherd speech in John. We heard Jesus say that he 100% commits to us, that we
are His and He is ours, that He’s willing to suffer for us, to know rejection
for us, and lead us on in our pilgrimage. Today, in this image of the vine and
the branches, Jesus uses a different image to say a lot of the same things, but
there are some different emphases.
Let’s start with what Jesus has to say about His unity with us. If He
is the vine, and we are the branches, to start with, that’s a really close
connection. And it’s not just that we’re physically close to one another, but
that we’re made of the same stuff. In the incarnation, God became like us in
all things but sin, and in baptism, we begin our journey of being made more and
more Christlike.
As branches off a vine, it’s the vine that gives us security and
stability, and makes us bold enough to reach out. I remember once climbing a
ladder to hang a banner in church and realizing that I was comfortable reaching
out to do that only because I trusted the person at the bottom holding the ladder
to be both strong enough and committed enough. Our closeness to Christ is what
lets us reach out, like branches. Jesus tells us to remain in Him, to abide in Him,
and the amazing thing is that a commitment to remain in Him doesn’t limit us,
in fact it frees us to be able to reach out.
In fact, He wills us to reach out, because Christ’s fruits are
offered to the world on the branches that we are. We all have gifts that are
capable of feeding a hungry world. The task of discernment is to come to know a
little more clearly quite what ours are and to find that part of our world that
needs just what we have.
Because there is a lot of hunger in our world, physical, of course,
but also emotional, also spiritual. There is a lot of thirst. Jesus’ choice of
the image of a vine rather than some kind of fruit tree, say, fits the kind of
agriculture that was carried out in His setting. Grapes, olives, and figs are
some of the few kinds of fruit that can grow in that kind of warm arid climate.
It’s a climate where water is a scarcity. And grape vines can flourish in a
climate like that, but for that to happen, a lot of work is needed on the part
of the vineyard workers. It takes expertise, great care, and hard labor. In
using this particular image, Jesus draws our attention to two things: firstly,
how God cares for us that we might flourish; and, secondly, that we need that
care, because our world can be really hard at times.
We need to be aware of both of those things. If we lose sight of the fact
that God does care for us, we either lose hope, or we find something else that
we think can sustain us, and it will fail to last. But if we lose sight of the
fact that there are problems in our world, there is hardship caused by the
natural world, and suffering caused by sin and injustice, then we’re also
missing something really important. We’re missing why God gives us fruit.
Plants have phloem, conduits in which things flow in both directions.
As branches, we first and foremost receive grace and love and care from Christ
our branch, but we also send stuff back. We offer our lament over what saddens
us in our world, we offer our willingness to act, we offer our thanksgiving and
our sacrifice. We ask God to prune us from all those sins that cling to us like
barnacles, making us less agile, less able to love.
All of this happens in an iconic way in each Mass. We gather, we
offer our prayers, we are fed with what we need, connected sacramentally with
Christ, and then we go out, as branches loaded with good fruit, to glorify the
Lord with our life.
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