Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter

Lectionary: 287

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and everyone that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit. You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you.
Remain in me, as I remain in you.

After the apparent end of the conversation in chapter fourteen -- “Come now, let us go!” – Saint John’s Last Supper discourse resumes in chapter 15. Scholars offer various explanations as to what happened here. We can let them worry about that as we ponder the parable of the Vine and Branches.

Saint Paul imaged the Lord as the head of his body, the Church. What is a body without a head? Or a head without a body? (Don’t even ask!) Christ and his Church are inseparable; they cannot be known without each other. Saint John’s image of the vine and the branches is equally compelling. A vine without branches is obviously dead; and branches apart from their vine are doomed to wither and die. And some branches are dead although they seem to be connected to the vine. You know they're dead because they bear no fruit.

Saint John’s gospel describes a living, direct contact with the Lord, especially through the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist. Scholars tell us this Gospel, written at the end of the first century or beginning of the second, addressed Gnosticism. Gnostics split the universe into two parts and assigned values of good and evil to the separate parts: spirit is good; flesh is evil. Divine is good; human is bad. Power is good; weakness is evil. Men are good; women are evil.

When they heard that the Jewish God had declared, “It is good!” of created things, Gnostics supposed that the Jewish God could not be the Supreme Being, but a lesser being. They hoped to ascend through various stages from the filth of material earth beyond the God of the Hebrews to the spiritual glory of heaven.

Twenty centuries later people still regard the “spiritual” as superior to things like flesh, physical, human, politics, complexity, and so forth. They especially hate authority for (they say) there are no authorities in the spiritual world.

Against Gnosticism, Saint John insisted, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Our connection with God is through the flesh of Jesus; that connection is established by the sacraments, especially Baptism and Eucharist. It engages the fellowship of the church.

I met a former Catholic who rhapsodized about a small, rural church in Kentucky where, he says, nobody arrives late for their Sunday service. They sing the hymns and participate with obvious enthusiasm. No one rushes to the parking lot afterward; in fact, they stay to visit one another. I suggested that, were he to join the church, he would encounter ordinary people doing the messy things that people do. He would find disagreements, power plays, and backroom scheming. My friend agreed with my suspicions but said he didn’t want to know about that. He just liked the spiritual feeling the church gave him when he occasionally attended. 

I don’t think the Lord died on a cross to give me a spiritual feeling. Nor does the Church gather each week to entertain strangers.

Rather, like a vine-grower, the Spirit prunes us with the shears of penance and lashes us to the pole of Baptism with the bonds of Eucharist so that we bear fruit for eternal life.