The Sixth Sunday of Easter

If you listened carefully when Father Richardson introduced the Gospel reading just now, you’ll recall that he referred to it as "The Gospel according to John," not the Gospel of John. That’s because John, like the other evangelists, is not reporting his own good news, but the good news of Jesus Christ, according to him. Each of the Gospels is that particular evangelist’s way of seeing Jesus, his unique way of reporting the good news about Jesus as he himself sees it. Each Gospel is, in effect, the evangelist’s response to Peter’s charge that one ought always "be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you."

That the evangelists differ in the ways in which they see and understand Jesus becomes especially clear when the Fourth Gospel is compared to the other three. In John, Jesus speaks in ways that simply don’t sound like the Jesus of the other Gospels. "I am the Good Shepherd"..."I am the bread of life"..."I am the light of the world"..."I am the true vine." We hear Jesus talk this way only in John, because it is John’s way of reporting what John believes to be the meaning of Jesus for him, and for us.

That’s why the Gospels should always be referred to as The Gospel according to John, or according to Matthew or Mark or Luke. Each of them is one evangelist’s perspective.

Someone once said that the Fourth Gospel is "a book in which a child can wade and an elephant can swim." "I am the true vine," says Jesus, according to John. It’s a simple image, and yet it begs to be mined for meaning beneath the surface. Just what is John trying to tell us when he has Jesus speak this way? "How can a person be a vine?" is a question that pops immediately to mind. And in what sense can a vine be true or false? Is there a "false" vine that the "true" vine can be compared to?

John wrote the Fourth Gospel late in the first century, perhaps in the 9th or 10th decade, sixty or seventy years after the Resurrection. And it’s helpful for us to know what was going on in the world at the time John was writing. He wrote in the midst of a struggle between two groups of Jews who were living in gentile lands. One of the questions they were arguing among themselves was this: who is the real God? This is part of the context of the Fourth Gospel.

There were those Jews, on the one hand, who wanted to have nothing to do with Jesus. No good Jew would follow Jesus, they argued, because Jesus was at best a troublemaker and at worst a blasphemer. If you were a good Jew, they claimed, then you would have nothing to do with Jesus.

The other group believed Jesus to be Messiah, the One God himself had sent to be the Savior of Israel. To them, therefore, a good Jew would follow Jesus, because Jesus was God’s own anointed. This is part of what John wanted to say when he wrote the Fourth Gospel -- that Jews can be followers of Jesus and remain good Jews. If fact, John tries to make clear that if Jews reject Jesus, they will be rejecting God himself, because Jesus is the rightful heir of Yahweh, the God of Israel.

When Paul, a Jew who was following Jesus, visited the gentile city of Athens, he found the Greeks asking the same question: who is God? But they, of course, being Greek, were asking it in their own way.

Paul wandered around the public square looking at all the monuments to the various gods the Athenians worshipped and talking with all the philosophers who hung out in the square. And he began to preach the Gospel according to Paul. He began to teach about Jesus and the resurrection, and the Athenians were puzzled about that, because they had never heard anything like that before.

Now it is Luke who is telling us about this in his own Gospel according to Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, and, as Luke says, "all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas." So, although they remained skeptical about what Paul was preaching, they urged him to tell them more.

(William Willimon says that "Paul pursued the legendary Athenian curiosity into the Areopagus where the Athenians spent their days doing what intellectuals enjoy, relieving their boredom by searching for new ideas." Anyway, the Greeks seemed to have a limitless ability to absorb any and every idea, even conflicting belief systems, into themselves.)

In the public square in Athens, therefore, they had idols built to just about everybody's god, as if they were all of equal value, all equally true. So Paul says to them, "Hmm...I see that you are extremely religious."

I don't think Paul is praising them. I think Paul is recognizing a truth about all the nations, the truth about all peoples, including Jews, namely, that we human beings are incurably religious. If given half a chance to worship, we will worship anything: gold, silver, wood, rock stars, football stars, basketball stars, astronauts, therapy, new age crystals, sex, science, physical fitness, health care, the flag, the military, democracy, monarchy, any political system that promises us the best deal and the most money. We in the United States are as good as the first-century Greeks ever were at chasing the latest novelties and fads, and at making them into gods. If you don't believe it, just check out our public squares the next time you're in one. Or check our magazines, or watch television.

Our chief problem as human beings has never been atheism, but idolatry. We are all "extremely religious." Idolatry comes to us naturally.

That, I think, is what Paul is addressing in the 17th chapter of Acts. And it’s what John is addressing in the 15th chapter of his Gospel as well. "I am the true vine," Jesus says in his long speech in John just before he is crucified. "I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain with the vine, you'll bear fruit. If you don't, you'll be pruned and thrown out."

John’s Jesus is saying that we should be mindful of our roots. John’s Jesus is the first fundamentalist. But he's a real fundamentalist. He is calling us to live according to what is fundamental to us as children of God. A healthy vine, he reminds us, is connected to its roots. He's telling us to hold on to God, not to the King James Version of the Bible.

Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, the figure of the vine is used as an image of God and his people: the vine is the people, and God is the vine dresser, who is the source of life for the vine.

In time, the vine became a symbol for the nation itself. In the days of the Maccabees, just 150 or 200 years before Jesus, the vine was imprinted on the nation’s coins, much as we put Abraham Lincoln on our pennies. A large, elaborate vine of gold adorned the entrance to the Holy Place in the Temple, and if one wanted to make a really fine gift, perhaps in memory of someone, what he often sought to do was to give enough money to provide another cluster of grapes on the vine over the entrance to the sanctuary.

And the prophets , too, used the vineyard as an image of Israel. "The Lord had a vineyard on a fertile hillside," says Isaiah. "The Lord dug the hillside up and cleared it of stones, and he planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it, and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes."

But the vine yielded wild, sour grapes instead of good ones, says the prophet. So the Lord said, "What more could I have done for my vineyard than I have done for it? When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only bad? Now I'll tell you what I'm going to do to my vineyard. I will take away its hedge, and the vineyard will be destroyed. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated, and briars and thorns will grow there."

And by the time John is writing the Gospel that bears his name, Judea was a pretty wild briar patch. The Temple had been destroyed, and along with it the golden vine above the door as well as a lot of other false gods that had been rooted in some pretty rocky soil, including their meticulous system of sacrifices. And the people of Israel found themselves once again dispersed to many lands, including Greece, where they were tempted by the idols of us gentiles as well as by some of their own they brought with them.

It is in this context, the end of the first century A.D., that John wrote the Fourth Gospel to Jews living in gentile lands. And in chapters 13-17, John has Jesus make this long speech at the Last Supper: "I am the true vine," he says. "I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain with the vine, you'll bear good fruit. If you don't, you'll be pruned and thrown out."

It’s an image that spoke volumes to the Jews John was writing for. It said that life lived the way Jesus lived his life is the life God intended for Israel and for all the people. This is the good news, according to John. Jesus is the good fruit that God's people, God's vineyard, were intended to bear, but hadn’t.

And Jesus bears this fruit because he is the true vine who doesn't chase around after all kinds of strange gods, gods that disappoint, but he remains connected with the source, connected to the root, to the fundament, to the Father of Israel, the creator and sustainer of the world. He remains rooted in truth; he remembers. He remembers that what God really wants from his people, and for his people, is good fruit, justice and mercy. And because he remembers, justice and mercy is the fruit which he himself bears.

This speech, remember, takes place just before Jesus is crucified. Jesus has just washed his disciples' feet. And Jesus is just about to walk out and give up his own life for the sake of truth, for the sake of good fruit, for the sake of showing us what real life is, for the sake of justice and mercy.

What John is saying to us through this speech of Jesus is that the way of the Cross is the truth of God: To the Jews, for whom this truth was a stumbling block, John is saying that Jesus is who God really is when God lives in this world in flesh and blood. He is one who loves his people so much that he lays down his own life for his friends, so that they can know what the truth of God is, so that they too can remain rooted in him and bear good fruit, doing justice and mercy for one another. And to the gentiles in the city squares of Athens and Colorado Springs, to whom this truth is folly, Paul is saying that this is truth unknown to them. But they can know it, and it is truth that will nourish them, if they come to know know it and live it.

In order to bear fruit, vines have to be nurtured. They have to remain rooted in the soil, and their branches have to be pruned in order to bear good fruit.

Is it not the same with us? Every new idea is neither wonderful nor true just because it's new. And every old idea is neither wonderful nor true just because it's old. Americans, like Athenians, might do well not to have pantheons, temples in which any and all gods are worshipped. We would do better if we were more discriminating about our gods. And twentieth-century Christians, like first-century Jews, might do better, John is saying, if we would stick to our roots, to our real roots, to the deep and abiding root, who is God.

And the root of the matter is this: Love God with all your heart and all with all your soul and with all your might -- with all your wealth, in other words, because that’s what the word "might" means here. And love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets, everything that’s good and important in life, everything that God wants for us, hangs on this.

And this is the Gospel according to Jesus, the Gospel written not with pen and ink, but with his life and blood. It’s the Gospel of the Word of God who lived among us that we might know him, the Gospel of the Word of God who died for us that we might know the power of a love so strong that whoever has it lays down his life for his friends, and the Gospel of the Word of God raised to life that we might live that same life. It’s the Gospel according to Jesus, the unknown God, the God of the Cross and the empty tomb, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to our public squares.

But John wrote his book, the Gospel according to John, and Paul preached in Athens the Good News according to Paul, in order that we might know him, and, knowing him, might live as he lived, bearing for one another the fruit he bore for us.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.