Today's reading clearly says that, as living branches which are connected to the trunk of the vine, we must be pruned in order to fulfil our purpose - which is to bear much fruit. We are not called to quietly continue as an insignificant little branch, moving steadily through the seasons of our life but failing to grow and failing to increase our output. According to the image in our reading, we must be prepared to be cut back, to be repositioned, perhaps to be re-planted into new soil, to be nourished and cared for, until we produce fruit and earn our keep within the vineyard.
So, perhaps we need to look at our growth and our output on the Christian vine and ask ourselves:
Of all the gospels, the Gospel of John is the one which uses metaphors and comparisons to seek to explain the significance of Jesus to the world. In this, John takes a very different approach to the accounts of Mark, Matthew and Luke. None of them record Jesus using the great and memorable sayings which John attributes to him: 'I am the gate of the sheepfold'; 'I am the resurrection and the life'; 'I am the good shepherd'; 'I am the light of the world'; 'I am the way, the truth and the life'; 'I am the bread of life'; and, 'I am the true vine'.
The symbol of the vine, and its fruit, and the wine which comes from that fruit, are intricately bound up in the church's understanding of God. Only John among the gospel-writers places the words 'I am the true vine' into the mouth of Jesus. And yet the image of the vine as a sign of God bearing fruit in the world has a long history within the Hebrew tradition.
John the Baptist came out of the heart of the Hebrew tradition even though he knew that revolutionary change was coming; and both Matthew and Luke record his words when challenging the Pharisees and Sadducees, and he says: "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance…Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."
In
Psalm 80, the poet looks back to Moses' delivery of the Hebrew people from
slavery with the words:
"You brought a vine out of Egypt;
You drove out the nations and planted it.
You cleared the ground for it;
It took deep root and filled the land."
When
the prophet Jeremiah is rebuking the people of Israel for their faithless
behaviour he says:
"Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob…
Long ago you broke your yoke
And burst your bonds,
And you said 'I will not serve!'
On every high hill
And under every green tree
You sprawled and played the whore.
Yet I planted you as a choice vine,
From the purest stock.
How then did you turn degenerate
And become a wild vine?"
The
prophet Isaiah has an extended section in chapter 5 where he uses a vineyard
as a symbol of the House of Israel. He asks:
"What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in
it? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?
Again in chapter 27, Isaiah tells how the vineyard, which is Israel, will be restored.
Hosea describes Israel as "a luxuriant vine that yields its fruit".
Ezekiel warns his listeners how the wood of the vine is good only for putting on the fire to be burnt. He also describes in a riddle how the Lord "took a seed from the land, placed it in fertile soil; a plant by abundant waters, he set it like a willow twig. It sprouted and became a vine spreading out, but low; its branches turned towards him, but its roots remained where it stood. So it became a vine; it brought forth branches, put forth foliage."
Later,
Ezekiel laments Israel's history of captivity and exile and the lack of
a King to unite the nation in these terms:
"Your mother was like a vine in a vineyard transplanted by the water,
Fruitful and full of branches from abundant water.
It's strongest stem became the ruler's sceptre; it towered aloft among the
thick boughs;
It stood out in its height with its mass of branches.
But it was plucked up in fury, cast down to the ground;
The east wind dried it up; its fruit was stripped off,
Its strong stem was withered; the fire consumed it.
Now it is transplanted into the wilderness, into a dry and thirsty land.
And fire has gone out from its stem, has consumed its branches and fruit,
So that there remains in it no strong stem, no sceptre for ruling."
It is against this deep cultural background, and with a powerful religious understanding of what it meant to be planted by God as a vine destined to bear fruit, that John depicts Jesus telling his followers that he is the true, authentic vine: the one which supersedes all previous plantings which had become wild, unmanageable, and so no longer true - a not-so-subtle hint that the Judaism of Jesus's day was wild, unmanageable and no longer true to its core beliefs. Here, in this new vine of Jesus, is God's new beginning, destined to bear much fruit through the branches which take their life from the core of the vine, but which must be pruned to remain fruitful. It is an image that would have been deep with cultural meaning to Jesus's listeners, and equally so to John's readers around 70 years after Jesus's death.
When we apply these images to our lives today:
I think we get some interesting glimpses, as well as some significant challenges.
We are a church which specialises in profound change. Many of us have been required to recognise our own authentic self deep within a confusing tangle of thorns and weeds which society has wrapped around us. Embracing the deepest truth about our sexual identity, or our gender identity, and pruning away much of the remaining undergrowth - a process we tend to call 'coming out' - is clearly a process of pruning; and it can be a harsh and difficult experience - indeed we can all think of occasions when it has been so traumatic that it has killed the plant. But we can also recognise that, for many of us, our true and authentic lives really began when we pruned back the fear and the untruths and became ourselves.
One of the pruning activities that this church most frequently performs is to reconnect the newly pruned branches to the core of the vine, to reinforce and reaffirm their own profound knowledge that they belong to the vine, that they are loved, that they are being nourished, and will bear fruit. This remains, for MCC, an image of everything we do around self-esteem, around inclusion, around healing, and around our message of the unconditional love of God for all.
Encouraging the production of fruit on the vine is an image of everything we do to develop the ministries of all people, our investment and focus on education, learning and personal growth, our emphasis on the discovery, discernment, and rediscovery of our gifts, and our core messages around the understanding of our relationship to Jesus. This is basically what we call 'discipleship' and is something we regularly revisit, season by season, because we are told to expect better and better harvests of fruit.
One of the great paradoxes of our human nature seems to be that, while the whole of our lives is essentially a process of continual change, and while our physical, mental and spiritual evolution points to us being a very adaptable species which handles new environments better than many others, we often resist change and struggle to remain within the comfort and familiarity of the status quo. And yet, we face change in the totality of our lives every day.
I can think of major changes in my life which were a kind of pruning - a cutting back of the dead wood to stimulate a new start:
We will all have our own experiences of new starts following major change. This is not only a natural part of life, it is one of the ways in which our lives are stimulated to produce new growth - it is how we blossom and flourish. And just as we recognise this in God's wider world of creation, and in the life-changing actions of our daily lives, so we must recognise it in our faith lives.
But it's not always a comfortable experience.
An absolute, unchanging, literal or tradition-bound faith is a wonderfully warm and reassuring comfort-blanket within which to wrap ourselves when we are called into new experiences, particularly when those new experiences might lead to profound change. Yet whenever we are tempted to wrap that blanket tighter and tighter around ourselves, are we not at risk of ignoring the wider plans of the vine-keeper?
We are blessed to belong to a church which specialises in profound change. Through this church, the authentic message of Jesus has changed and shaped many of us into fruitful vines. It continues to change lives and save lives. The challenge Jesus puts before us, is to remain in him, to allow him to shape our growth from the core of his message, and for us to share our fruits of that growth with the world around us.
But I think Jesus also leaves each of us with some uniquely personal questions:
And even though our present culture no longer uses images of vines and vineyards as working examples of God's actions in our world, they're still good questions for today's disciples, aren't they?
Amen.
(Philip Jones)
This
sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester.
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