a Homily for Easter 5B

Text: John 15:1-8

One of the problems we face when we read the parables of Jesus is that many of them have a light side and a dark side. They often illustrate what will happen when we are right with God and when we aren’t. Our saving grace, most of the time, is that he tells the parables in an imaginative way that causes us to engage the multiple characters within them. For instance, the parable we know as “The Good Samaritan” involves a man dying by the side of the road, two Jewish leaders, and one compassionate outsider or enemy. The richness of that parable comes from our being able to see ourselves in each these characters: that none is necessarily a stand in for us.

That is not the case here. We rarely have a gospel pericope so intentionally specific as this one. Jesus provides the gospel commentary within the text itself! He lays out the characters: God is the vinegrower, Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. We have come to expect more options than this. Do we really have to be the branches? Because we just read what happens to them and it doesn’t really sound good for any of us. In this case, getting right with God involves pruning and being wrong with God involves getting cut off thrown in the fire. In either case, we’re cut or chopped, and let’s be honest, our chances of ending up in that fire actually sound pretty good. Which is bad, right?

We don’t really like any of this because we want control over our lives. We don’t want to feel like pawns in some twisted game between good and evil. No one has ever wanted to be Job. Ever. And this is particularly bad for us in the USbecause we are so independent. It is engrained in our culture to be independent; to make our own decisions. This isn’t the case everywhere. In one of the parenting books we have at home, the authors point out that our need to make our children do everything for themselves really early is our thing, and is often done well before it is developmentally appropriate. This is in sharp contrast with parts of several Asian cultures in which children are spoon fed by a parent into 5 years of age. This may seem strange to many of us, but it is done to be less wasteful of food and maintain intimacy with the parents. The child will have plenty of time to feed herself later; say, the rest of her life.

This is our psychological dysfunction. Our obsession with independence. It has been there since our ancestors claimed it as a right. But that need for independence clouds our vision and obscures our ability to see the virtue of intimacy: with God and one another.

I visited with Fr. Franklin Bennett this past week. He showed me his backyard and on his back patio there is a canopy like a trellis, and climbing up the side and across the top are wisteria vines. Wisteria is that tiny, beautiful purple flower that blooms in bunches. The whole group hangs elegantly, with the intrinsic splendor found in seeing the many flowers as one. He described the amount of work he has put into growing these vines and how much pruning he has to do to keep them healthy and prevent them from growing wild.

These vines don’t creep on his patio. They are twisted together up the side and are spread out along the top. Several of these on top of the canopy are twisted together and stretch across the length of the canopy. He spoke of concern for them because of the recent frosts.

In our gospel pericope for this morning, we understand that God is into serious pruning.  Maybe like the pruning required to keep wisteria looking beautiful, providing shade for the patio, and contributing a fantastic scent for those sitting beneath them.

Nowhere in this story is Jesus referring to branches of other vines or branches that grow without the vine. To be more plain, if we are all branches, then we are all branches, pruned together. And perhaps, like that wisteria vine, grown and pruned by God to form a great, singular function.

We may be tempted to hear in this pericope cause for greater division, being distracted by its darker side. As Jesus states that:

Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.

We place this in the familiar Protestant trope of personal belief in Jesus=personal salvation. And because it is all about the personal salvation, it must also be all about my personal belief. This ignores the rest of the text, the rest of Scripture, and even what we read last week! It was last week that we talked about Jesus being the Good Shepherd of all the sheep and that His purpose is to bring more sheep and flocks of sheep into the fold. No individual belief there. This is what comes of our abiding in Jesus: partnership, intimacy, and relationship. None of these words is solitary.

The tangling and mixing that happens in our lives is represented in that vine metaphor. We are twisted and wrapped around one another because of intimacy and to create intimacy. God wants us together. The shaping and pruning of the vine and the branches need not be seen as controlling or violent, but as bringing health and form where we tend to become unhealthy and wild.

We are being shaped as we grow and it is our relationship to Jesus (the vine) and to other people (the branches) that reveals our place in the much bigger picture. We are always being pruned to become something even more beautiful, more perfect because our intimacy makes it so. How beautiful we will be very soon as it becomes our season to bear fruit.