NewCreation

Homily for Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the fifth Sunday in Easter. This Sunday we are given a further insight into the dimension of what it is like to live in the risen Christ, with Jesus' image of the true vine. "I am the true vine and my Father is the vine grower." And of course this is, as with the image of the shepherd, both a rural image and an image which looks back to Israel. Israel being God's chosen vine which he took out of Egypt — it's in the Psalms, it's in Ezekiel, it's in Isaiah. So this is a frequent metaphor for Israel. And here we have Jesus as the true vine, what Israel is all about. "My Father is the vine grower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes or cleanses to make it bear more fruit." Okay, so this is what a vine grower does. I didn't realize this, but vines are of course ground-creeping plants. They just, if they were left to their own devices, would grow flat across the ground. They have to be forced to go up things, trellises and the like, and it's only if they do that that their fruit can grow in such a way that it hangs rather than immediately getting bogged down and eaten on the ground. So a vine is always a very highly artificial product, process. It's something that the vine grower has to take a great deal of care of and really knows what the vine grower is doing. I think that that's part of the image Jesus is talking about. He's talking about something that is very, very much cared for. It's lifted up in all the right places, it's pruned, it's cleansed, so as to allow it to bear fruit. This is a very deliberate, careful exercise, and when that happens it's extraordinarily powerful and it bears an extraordinary amount of fruit. And I don't know whether you've ever seen a vine close up, but the interesting thing about it is the vine itself looks dead. It's gnarled and looks like a dead stick, basically. Not so the branches. The branches are green and supple and come out of it, and obviously the fruit — when the tendrils and the fruit are all green and supple. But there's this strange juxtaposition of this apparently dead stick out of which comes so much life. And I think that that's part of the image that Jesus is using here. He's talking about how he, the risen Lord, is the dead-and-alive one. He's the one who is apparently dead and in whose death we are buried so that we can become alive and become him. I think that that's what he's talking about. He's talking about how we can share his dead-and-alive quality and how sticking with that dead-and-alive quality — not running away from it — is what's going to allow us to be pruned and turned into bearers of fruit. One of the remarks that I wish I understood better — I raise it as a question more "than anything else, you've already been cleansed or pruned by the word that I have spoken to you." So something about his speaking to us — what he spoke to his disciples before this, before the speech which is given during the Last Supper — something about the words which he speaks to us, they enable us to live in this dead-and-alive space without running away from it. And it's that that allows us to begin to yield fruit, because he's quite clear that what he wants is, as it were, for all his sap to rise through us. He talks about this at the end: "If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish and it will be done for you." So abiding, dwelling, making our home in him — that's the sense. Which means making this home out of his words, allowing his words to correct us, to nurture us, to nudge us. It's difficult to know exactly what's meant, but this dwelling with his words alters our pattern of desire such that he is able to desire through us and that our desire is his desire. And for that — "if you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish and it will be done for you" — that's the sense of us actually finding ourselves at home in him, becoming co-part of it, sapped into the home so that we're actually part of it and it actually flows through us. That, I think, is part of the richness of what's going on here. And he also gives the other perfectly standard bits of advice: if a branch is obviously not part of the sap, it withers and falls off; it is good for nothing but burning. So this business of remaining in his word — it's a curious thing. How do we do that? What does it look like to find ourselves remaining in the word, allowing the sap to rise in us, allowing his words to nudge us, to correct us, to nurture us? That, I think, is part of what he's saying is going to be what our life is like from now on. It's going to be listening to the word, dwelling in the word, allowing ourselves to become his self by our imitation, by our being taken over gently by his Spirit — and enabled to find ourselves actually wanting amazing things, much bigger things than we could have imagined, and getting them, bearing fruit, and this whole thing being an adventure with a very careful, very caring, very wise vine grower who knows where to prune, who knows where to sift, who knows how to carry us through the times when we think that we're just bits of dead wood and no good at all, and is aware that there's a season when the sap will come and we will turn into fruit. that we might fear that we were never going to see. In the name of the Father, of the Son, of the Holy Spirit. Amen.