JOHN 15: 1-8

Jottings on John…Easter 5…Revised 2018 

Jesus’ "I am the true vine" has more than one cutting edge to it. Pruning is important in our gardens & in our faith journey. We’ve given up growing grapes. It’s not the pruning that’s the trouble! It’s the parrots that abound where we live getting most of the grapes. As they still do our Olives; with a goodly share of mulberries & pomegranates thrown in for good measure. All in due season, of course! Maybe spiritual journeys, faith journeys, have seasons, too? A time to prune, a time to carry out other nurture? Might that be a useful question to ask of ourselves & our flocks?

As important a thrust of today’s passage as pruning, is, ‘remaining’ in Jesus. However we may interpret that; including remaining in His earthly Body, the Church. Even if we find the latter hard going sometimes! Ten times in ten verses Jesus uses, ‘remain’, one of the more frequent translations. (‘Abide’ smacks too much of a certain hymn often sung at the funerals of older people!) Are we helping our hearers understand that everything in our Gospels is translation? And a matter of interpretation?

 The translation I respond to most positively is, ‘live in’. Sydney Carter put this particularly well in his hymn, ‘Lord of the dance’.  Jesus, Himself the ‘Lord of the dance’, has it: “I’ll live in you as you live in me…” In another work, though, ‘The Present Tense’, Carter says, ‘Your holy hearsay is not evidence, Give me the good news in the present tense. So shut the Bible up and show me how The Christ you talk about is living now’. Some may find this a bit too radical; but for me, in these two contributions, Carter is helping us come to grips with both thrusts of today’s passage.

Another helpful insight comes from Luigi Gioia, OCSO, ¹ who tells us that praying the Lord’s Prayer (he stresses it is the Lord’s prayer, not ours) introduces us into ‘His relation with the Father through the Holy Spirit’. What Fr. Luigi, appears to be telling us from his own experience here, is that praying then becomes an ‘inside job’; not that of an outsider. We find ourselves participating in that Relation-ship that is God’s own Life, that Love that flows between the Father & the Son by the Spirit. Jesus doesn’t say, ’I Am the Life’ just for the sake of having something to say! What’s at stake here is the difference between talking about living, & actually experiencing being alive! When we live in Him & pray in Him as He teaches us, we are embraced in a God-us relationship. Dare one say, a kind of Holy Quadrilateral? That way we become more & more ‘insiders’ as God - all of God - becomes more real as we live in Him.

¹ ‘Say it to God’,  Bloomsbury, London, 2017, p. 78