In these last weeks of the Easter season, we always hear some very famous and sometimes very difficult to understand passages from the Gospel of John, like the one we just heard about the vine and the vine grower. This is from what is often called the final discourse, that takes up four whole chapters in the gospel of John, a long monologue from Jesus to his disciples late in the night before his passion and death. And what he seems to be most concerned to give them in their last moments together is image after image of what their relationship with Jesus will be in the future. Partly, this is a long and loving farewell, and there are many expressions of the deep love that this small group had for one another. As you might expect, there are also a few last reminders about what to do next, although frankly not as much as you might think.
But what it really seems to be all about in this final discourse is Jesus struggling to convince them somehow, that his leaving them is not like what they are imagining it will be. What he wants them to see is that he will be closer to them in the future, after he is gone, than he even is in the intimacy of that last night he spent with them on this earth. My guess is that this was a very difficult idea for them to grasp, because they knew he was talking about his death. How’s it even slightly possible that they could have a closer relationship with Jesus after his death than they did that night, being with him, hearing him speak, asking him questions? And he gives them a series of images of that relationship to try to get the point across, including this one we just heard, about the vine and the branches.
It’s an image of real beauty, isn’t it. A vine made up of all these interconnected parts, spreading off in all directions. But I think it’s so familiar that we don’t realize what it really means in terms of the relationship Jesus was trying to describe. Because what it’s trying to get across is that when we say we are Christians and have a relationship with Jesus, we’re not simply saying that we live with him as an example, and that we try to learn from the things he said and live the way he did. We do that, but that’s not the relationship. And life with Christ isn’t simply doing certain things that keep up our membership in this church and our identity as Christians, or even trying to speak with Jesus in prayer. We do that too, of course, but even that isn’t the relationship. What Jesus is telling us in this gospel is more even than that. Life with Christ is really being united with him as part of one living organism, as closely connected as a vine is to its branches. If we are connected with him like this, we live the same life he does; in a very tangible way, we are more than with him, we are one with him. We are him.
This kind of talk is no easier for us to grasp than it was for the disciples who heard it. We’re practical and down to earth people, and so were they. How exactly do you have that kind of a relationship with anyone? And how on earth can you have it with someone who is not here in the way that you and I are here, someone we have never met or touched? It seems like something that would have to be reserved for the great mystical saints, being one with God, and even then, we would hear their language about it and probably say, it doesn’t sound real.
So much as we like to hear about the branches and the vine, we find it hard to feel the closeness it says there is between Jesus and us. But this gospel is trying to tell us that we think that too little is possible. Here on earth we’re trained in life over time to keep our desires within realistic limits, and when it comes to God, we have been way overtrained this way. We think this relationship with God is a mountain, a long climb to a distant place where there isn’t much oxygen or many other people, and even if we made it to the top after years of Olympian spiritual training we won’t see anything up there that looks at all familiar to us. But Jesus isn’t telling us today that he is a mountain, he says he is a vine, he is one who is already connected to us, the one who unites us together in this place, the one we are already one with, for as long as we keep seeking him.
There aren’t many hints in this gospel about how to make this awareness of living in the presence of Jesus a reality for us. The only hint that seems clear, to stay with this gospel of the vine, is that being in this relationship might not involve climbing a mountain, but it does involves cutting things away. The great contradiction of vines is that they need constant and drastic cutting back if they’re going to do what vines are supposed to do. Everything that keeps us from this life of the vine, that keeps us from bearing fruit, keeps us from being connected to Christ, gets cut away and burned. Sometimes we even know what needs cutting in our lives, and it’s always shocking how hard it is to do it. You’d think it would be easy to put aside what makes us unhappy and angry, what drives us towards goals we know won’t satisfy us much. But clearing away this underbrush, one clump at a time, sometimes can clear some room for God, that God who is always trying to reveal his presence, and who wants nothing more than to see us be fruitful, over and over.