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Someone once observed that the Gospel according to John is “a book in which a child can wade and an elephant can swim.” “I am the true vine; you are the branches. Unless the branches abide in the vine, they cannot live,” says Jesus in John’s Gospel. It’s a simple image, simple enough for a child to grasp, and yet it begs to be mined for meaning deeper than a superficial hearing can provide. Just what is Jesus saying? How can a person be a vine? 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 his account of the good news of Jesus Christ late in the first century, perhaps in the 9th or 10th decade, sixty or seventy years after the Resurrection. 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 true God, the God who creates and nourishes life? A Jewish community in a gentile land asking this question is 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 are a Jew, they claimed, then you will have nothing to do with Jesus. “Besides, he is dead and buried,” they said. “We have God’s Law, and God simply expects us to follow it.” Other Jews believed Jesus to be Messiah, one whom God himself had sent to fulfill the Law and to be the Savior of Israel. To them, therefore, a 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 Jews. If fact, John insists, if Jews reject Jesus, then they reject God himself, because Jesus is the rightful heir of God, the true vine of Israel, as has been proved by God’s raising Jesus from the dead. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, those Scriptures Christians call the Old Testament, the vine is used as an image of God and his people: the vine is the people of Israel, 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 for all to see, 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 might do was give enough money to provide another cluster of grapes on the vine over the entrance to the sanctuary. 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 of Jesus, Israel could be said to have become a pretty wild briar patch. Tithes of dill and cumin, and sacrifices of bulls and rams, and commitment to the literal obedience of the Law filled the Temple, choking out the life God had created the people for, the life of justice and mercy. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” God had earlier warned them through his prophet and Jesus had reminded them later. But they had killed him for his trouble. And by the time John is writing the Gospel that bears his name, Judea was a even wilder briar patch. The Romans, who occupied the land, had destoyed the Temple, and along with it the golden vine above the entrance and the meticulous sacrificial system of Jewish worship. And the people of Israel found themselves once again dispersed to many lands, where they were tempted by the idols of us gentiles. 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. 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 cut off and thrown away.” 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. Jesus bears this fruit because he is the true vine who doesn’t chase around after all kinds of strange gods, gods that disappoint. Jesus bears good fruit because he remains connected with the source, connected to the root, to the fundament, to the God 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 not just circumcision of the foreskin, not just obedience to the letter of the Law, but circumcision of the heart. He remembers that what God wants from his people is not just Temple sacrifices, but the fruit of justice and mercy among the people. Jesus comes, John says, to bear the fruit that the people of Israel were intended to bear, but hadn’t. This speech, remember, takes place just before Jesus is crucified. Jesus has just washed his disciples’ feet, and he is about to walk out and give up his own life for the sake of truth, for the sake of the good fruit of the vine the Lord had expected of Israel, for the sake of showing us what real life is, for the sake of justice and mercy. All this, and more, is to be found in the image Jesus uses: “I am the vine, the true vine; you are the branches. If you remain with the vine, you’ll bear fruit. If you don’t, you’ll be cut off and thrown away.” John’s Jesus is saying that we should be mindful of our roots. John’s Jesus is a fundamentalist of the first order. But he’s a real fundamentalist, which is light years away from a literalist. Jesus calls us to live according to what is fundamental to us as children of God. A healthy people, he reminds us, is connected to its roots. A healthy people abides in God, holds on to God, not to the letter of the Law, not to the King James Version of the Bible or to a few favorite verses here and there or to any other thing, however precious, that is incidental to life. A healthy people abides in its connection to the source of life. This connection is the truth of God and the way of God and the life of God, the way of the Cross. To the Jews for whom this truth was a stumbling block, John is saying that Jesus is who God is when God lives in this world in flesh and blood as a human being. He is one who loves his people so much that he lays down his own life for his friends, so that they, too, can know what the truth and the way and life 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 says that this is truth unknown to them. But they can know it. It is truth they were given life for, the truth that will nourish them, if they come to know know it in Jesus and to live it through him and in him. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” God reminds us. And yet the Church who would follow Jesus continues to spend an inordinate amount of its time on sacrifices, on the Law and on the rules and regulations of worship: How shall we worship? Is it Rite I or Rite II that God really approves? Which music shall we sing? Who should the clergy be, and who they should not be, and what should they wear? Who should bishops be, and who should not be a bishop? And all the while the need for mercy, in the neighborhood and in the Church, grows larger and larger. The cries from the poor and the oppressed become louder and louder, compassion is found wanting, injustice prevails, and we wither and die. Twentieth-century Christians, like first-century Jews, would do better, Jesus 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 the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind all with all your soul and with all your strength – with all your wealth and resources, in other words, because that’s what the word “strength” means here. And love your neighbor as yourself. Everything that God wants for us hangs on this,” says Jesus. It’s a simple image, simple enough that a child can grasp it. And yet it begs to be mined for meaning deeper than a superficial hearing can provide. For loving God and neighbor, doing justice and mercy, clearly cannot mean simply doing what we want to do, either as individuals or as a people. It cannot mean simply doing what that idol of democracy, the majority, wants. Loving God and neighbor means doing what is good, what is life producing and life sustaining, as God intended. Loving God and loving neighbor, doing justice and mercy, clearly cannot mean simply observing the letter of selected verses of the Law, for if that were all it means then Jesus would not have done all the good he did on the Sabbath. Loving God and neighbor, doing justice and mercy, clearly cannot mean simply doing what is good only for any individual branch of the vine, but also what is good for the health of the vine itself, because life, like the nation and like the Church of God, is of a piece. Loving God and neighbor, doing justice and mercy, is like marriage; it is work and commitment. It calls for life lived intelligently and deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was intended by God. It calls for study and prayer, not just for desire. It calls for study of the Scriptures, and for the study of life. It calls for commitment to the Body, commitment to the whole Body as well as to self and family. It calls for brotherly affection, for kindness, and for humility, the virtues St. Peter commends to us today. Loving God and loving neighbor calls for a judicious pruning of our lives, a judicious pruning of our habits and practices certainly, and maybe even of some of our cherished opinions. Loving God and loving neighbor is the work of a life, and of a life time – the lifetime not just of an individual, but of a people – and only time can tell about the fruit we will bear, for ultimately the Master Pruner is God. This is the good news according to Jesus, whose Gospel was written not with pen and ink, but with his life and his blood. It is the Gospel of the Word who lived among us that we might know him, the Gospel of the Word who died for us that we might know the power of a love strong enough to lay down one’s own branch for the life of the vine. It is the Gospel of the unknown God, the God of the Cross and the empty tomb, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to our public squares, both secular and religious. But John wrote his book, the Gospel of Jesus according to John, and Paul preached in Athens the Good News of Jesus according to Paul in order that we might hear this Gospel and know Jesus and that, knowing him, we might live and die as he lived and died, and might die and live as he died and lives, bearing for one another the fruit he bore for us. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |