For Sunday
Easter 5B
Collect
Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Reading
From John 15:1-8
“You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. ”
Reflection
My Mom is a very good gardener with a great eye for it. I was just drawn to other pursuits.
And it’s because I’m not much of a gardener that I am really reluctant to prune. I can’t get over the idea that I must be hurting the plant somehow. It feels antithetical to caring for the plant to snip its branches. Even as I know that’s how it works, it feels like something else entirely.
I also see how people who are much more comfortable with gardening than I taking to this analogy with gusto. Assuming that role, as master gardeners, we feel very confident in pruning. Pruning the problems in our own lives—and in other people.
Of course, Jesus doesn’t compare us to the gardener, but to the branches of the plant. The ones likely to receive the pruning. Being a good gardener only makes the prospect of getting pruned a cold comfort. For the rest of us, I can’t help but think of performance evaluations, rating scales, and making the cut.
It seems this image is almost too powerful. It overwhelms the more significant teaching Jesus is offering us. That we “have already been cleansed” and that we may abide in Jesus as Jesus abides in us.
In a world that is so overwhelmingly obsessed with evaluations, Jesus reassures us that we are already cleansed. It isn’t earned in the future, but has already occurred.
Rather than being judged on an objective scale, a neutral baseline against which we are all competing to be considered well above-average, we already bear God’s grace and love.
What we’re about instead is living into this opportunity to bear fruit that isn’t ours to grow. To aid in God’s making miracles of the mundane. New life out of these old branches: God’s perfect through our imperfect. This is our project; not because we’re good at anything. But because we are all part of this greater organism that breathes life into this world. And any of us can be the branch from which a miracle might spring.