Easter 5 2024 Holy Wisdom Monastery Pam Shellberg John 15:1-8
As we move through the fifty days of the Easter season, the first stories of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances give way to images of the Christ-spirit’s ongoing presence and resurrection power with us and within us. Through texts taken from John’s gospel – and so very typical of that gospel – we are offered images that invite our contemplative meditation on the nature of reality, the nature of our unity with the divine, and the nature of community. Last week it was a shepherd laying down his life for his sheep. Next week, images of love, joy, and friendship. Today, an image of a vine and branches and an invitation to abide with Jesus. Enigmatic and puzzling words spoken in his lifetime come back to us on this side of the resurrection to fire our imaginations, our hope, our joy.
But I’m going to begin with a quote from another wisdom teacher, Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh: who said: “It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living.”
Similarly, we say the next Christ, the resurrected Christ is not an individual.
Jesus says, “I am the vine, you – and here he addresses us in the plural, all of you – are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” This vine in whom we abide and the fruit we bear is the resurrected Christ taking the form of a community. What does this image of vine and branches invite us to be, to do?
If you take a minute to visualize the branches on a vine, and the leaves on the branches – you might notice in your mental picture leaves that are pretty much indistinguishable one from the other. There might be a uniformity of branch and leaf – coming together in a beautiful image of lush wholeness.
But Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber identified – astutely, I think – what might just be a little obstacle for us in this image of community as branches and leaves all in some kind of a tangled mess. “It’s hard to know what’s what,” she said, “and if I am going to bear fruit, I want it to be attributed to my branch. If I’m too tangled up with other vines and branches, I may not get credit for my fruit.”
I wonder if this might have been exactly Jesus’ point.
“My mother-father is the vine-grower, removing every branch that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit the vine-grower prunes to make it bear more fruit.” “You have already been cleansed by the word I have spoken to you.”
If we looked at this passage in the language in which it was originally written, we’d see exactly the same Greek word translated in one place “prunes” just a sentence later translated “cleansed.” The gardeners among you will understand the semantic connection – that pruning plants is a kind of cleansing, a cleaning off of debris, of that which is no longer giving life – and sometimes of that which might actually be drawing too much life energy from the plant.
John takes advantage of the dual meaning here, creating a play on words between pruning and cleansing, because he wants to remind us of another part of his story, to take us back to last the place where some kind of cleansing happened – in the washing of the disciples’ feet at the last supper.
“You have already been cleansed by the word I have spoken to you.” What was that word already spoken by Jesus that cleansed and pruned the disciples? that cleanses and prunes us?
Jesus washed the disciples’ feet and told them they were to wash each other’s feet. He told the disciples that his word had made them clean. He said that he was setting an example to upend their ideas about servants and masters. When Jesus laid down his outer garments and knelt before his disciples, he was laying down his claim to privilege – establishing with them a new relationship he called “friendship.” All who are clean, all who are pruned, have a share with him – that’s what he said. This wasn’t just an example of the spiritual gift humble service but Jesus’ call for relinquishment. Jesus was clearing away the debris of rank and status; he was pruning the inclination to privilege individual gifts, one over another. His was a gesture of self-giving, divine hospitality, mutuality and generosity, of the radical equality of friendship. By it, the disciples would be cleansed; by it we will be, too.
The vine-grower prunes not only the branches that bear no fruit, the vine-grower also prunes branches that bear fruit. We are to understand that there is no branch that will not be wounded in some way on the way to a more full life. If it doesn’t bear fruit, it is cut away; but even if it does bear fruit, it will be pruned. If we don’t bear fruit, we will be cut away. But even if we do bear fruit, we will nevertheless be pruned. I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t sound like unambiguously good news to me.
But today we also heard Jesus say this, “Abide in me as I abide in you.” Eight times the word “abide” appears in today’s passage and it appears dozens of times more throughout John’s Gospel. This word, like others that John singles out for amplification, has a wide range of meanings. Listen for one that resonates especially with you as you considering abiding in the Christ: to remain, to tarry, to continue to be present, to be held continually, to endure, to not perish, to continue, to dwell. In John’s gospel, the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus at his baptism and abides in him; Jesus offers himself as the bread of life and says he abides in all who eat and drink of him – and they abide in him. There are countless instances where we are told that Jesus abided with his disciples or other friends, staying with them for a few days here, tarrying a few days there. In all cases, the context of Jesus’ abiding is intimate, reciprocal, relational; in all cases, it can be read metaphorically, poetically as something interior. Like an umbilical cord, the branches abide in the vine as their source of life.
Two meditations:
In 1917 Magnhild Cecelia Svensson brought a viney hoya plant to the United States when she immigrated here from Sweden with her brother John, a cutting of which was maintained by her niece, Joan. A leaf was taken off that plant in the late 1970’s by Joan’s niece – my partner, Judy – and that cutting grew into a plant which now, over 100 years later, is thriving in our home. Its life force continues, abiding through generations, the presence of family and love in a tangled mess of connection, rooted in history, vines spreading out over four feet of window sill, new shoots climbing up our curtains.
And I’ve always thought Mary Oliver’s poem, “White Flowers,” reveals so clearly the promise of the vine in which we abide…
Last night
in the fields
I lay down in the darkness
to think about death,
but instead I fell asleep,
as if in a vast and sloping room
filled with those white flowers
that open all summer,
sticky and untidy,
in the warm fields.
When I woke
the morning light was just slipping
in front of the stars,
and I was covered
with blossoms.
I don’t know
how it happened—
I don’t know
if my body went diving down
under the sugary vines
in some sleep-sharpened affinity
with the depths, or whether
that green energy
rose like a wave
and curled over me, claiming me
in its husky arms.
I pushed them away, but I didn’t rise.
Never in my life had I felt so plush,
or so slippery,
or so resplendently empty.
Never in my life
had I felt myself so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and the stems and the flowers
began.
The truth is we will be wounded in the pruning, in the cleaning away of the debris of our very human impulses to separate and categorize, to create hierarchies, and to claim privileges. We will probably still suffer – at least a little bit – when our fruit is not attributed to our branch. But today the holy one asks for our resurrection life together to be marked by creation, repair, and generativity; that we surrender to the wounding of our pruning so that we might come ever closer to the porous line where our bodies and its claims can be done with and the roots and stems and flowers of our communal life begin. The promise of resurrection life and love today is that our volitional surrender to such emptiness will leave us plush and resplendent in ways we can only imagine and that in our tangled, sticky, and untidy mess of branches we will know an almost unimaginable joy.
.