A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between Easter 5B and 6B
The text: John 15
This week’s gospel progresses directly out of last week’s. Jesus was talking about himself as the vine and his disciples as the branches and the product of our mutuality is the fruit.
It is, therefore, an image of intimacy and community.
Western culture throughout history has struggled with this conception. In part because we have lionized individuality. But also because we have simultaneously created a monstrous burden out of interconnectedness.
Our sense of being part of a greater whole is romanticized in times of war and extorted when some would seek to destroy our neighbors.
The American Project
Visions of community and mutual participation are used to make us feel bad when someone else tries to break our community. Opposition to war leads to ostracism and maintaining Jesus’s command to place no nation over God is tossed out for “God bless America”.
In recent decades, this has also been the project of those seeking to divide over sexuality. Not to recognize the diversity in the human condition, but to break ties with us and then claim that we forced them to.
Our sense of interconnectedness exists only as far as our willing participation in the common project. That is America’s common values in a nutshell.
And just as we explored last week, Jesus is speaking of intimacy in the midst of surrounding violence. People literally want to silence his message of love.
This is uncomfortable context for most of us—like a threat to the foundations of cultural hegemony. Precisely because this isn’t new teaching from Jesus, but nearly two thousand years old. Compared to that, these national identities of ours are what is brand new.
In short, our history and its service to patriotic attitudes, division over difference, and individual responsibility for community concerns all read as oppositional to the gospel.
The Different Command
The love command we get this week reflects a natural progression from the teaching Jesus offers at the start of chapter 15. But for us, it ought to read as a response to our own question of Jesus:
What then should we do?
If we recognize the challenge Jesus is offering, not just to those living under Roman occupation but to those today living in American democracy.
What should we do about the individualizing forces we live with? How should we take the ways of being that demonize, disrespect, and divide? Love anyway.
The love command comes as a necessary response. Part antidote, perhaps. Part necessity. Part obvious alternative. Love people. And not because we individually love them. Or because we love individual people (or kinds of people) but because love is our nature. It is our action and reaction.
Love begets community. And it reflects the character of a healthy vine.