John 15:1-8:
1 “I am the true grapevine, and my Father is the vine grower. 2 He takes away every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he cleanses it to make it bear more fruit. 3 You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.
4 Abide in me as I abide in you. A branch is not able to bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me.
5 I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. 6 Whoever does not abide in me is cast out like a dried branch; such branches are gathered, cast into the fire, and burned.
7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”
Around these parts when we hear the word, “vine,” we tend to think of either honeysuckle or ivy. In Jesus’s day the word vine would have evoked the image of the grapevine. Grapevines require intense cultivation. Left to itself, a grapevine becomes useless for bearing good fruit. Arborist and gardening author Lee Reich wrote, “Few garden sights are as sorry as an untended grapevine. Its branches become so tangled that sunlight and air no longer dry them readily, making the plant prone to disease. The grapes become difficult to harvest because they are out of reach.”
Jesus used grapevines to explain his purpose in the world and the common life of those who follow him. His hearers understood vine as a metaphor for Israel and its people. Psalm 80 says, “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it. You cleared the ground for it, and it took root and filled the land. Watch over this vine, the root your right hand has planted, the son you have raised up for yourself” (Ps. 80:8-15, excerpts). The Jews understood themselves as a people of God, a vine, planted and cultivated by God.
The biblical image of a vine conveys a deep sense of community and mutuality of the people with God and one another. The fruitfulness of the branches depends on their connection to the vine.
“To live as the branches of the vine is to belong to an organic unity shaped by the love of Jesus, and individual branches join together to bear fruit, of living in a way that reveals us to be a community of Jesus’ disciples” (NIB). As branches of a vine, the church is a community of persons collectively known for their love for God, one another and the world at large.
What makes us a Christian community is solely our relationship to God and Jesus. Our mark is how we love one another as Christ loves us. There is only one task, to bear fruit, and any branch can do that if it remains with Jesus.
To our modern ears, the image Jesus evokes of taking away fruitless branches and throwing them into the fire seems stern. Yet that is not what Jesus said. The fruitless branches of verse 2 are not the branches cast into the fire in verse six.
Verse two actually shows the patience and grace of God. Grapevines bear more fruit when they are elevated off the ground. In ancient Israel, modern wires and frames to hold the whole vine off the ground did not exist. There was no wire. Rope was expensive so dressers used rocks, which were plentiful, to hold the vines off the ground. So even the main trunk was only a few inches off the ground.
Vines that grew from the main trunk often dropped to the ground. In the rainy season they either rotted or they took root themselves. Neither are fruitful. In the eight-month dry season they could dry out completely. Verse two says that fruitless branches are taken away but verse six does not say they are burned. It is the dried, dead branches that are burned.
The word used for “taken away” also means “lifted up.” In ancient Israel, vine dressers liked new branches to form because larger vines produce more fruit. So they did not “take away” new branches that crawled on the ground, they elevated them off the ground with rocks. They lifted them up.
Jesus’ hearers knew that he meant that fruitless branches were lifted up off the ground, not that they were severed and thrown away, because they knew that was how vineyards were cultivated and made fruitful. They would have understood Jesus to say, “He lifts up every branch in me that bears no fruit.” Such branches are nurtured because they are still living and are still connected to the vine. They are cared for so that they may start to bear fruit.
Vine dressers also prune – Jesus says “cleanse” because he is speaking spiritually – fruitful branches to enable the vine to produce fruit according to the dresser’s needs. Pruning sounds destructive, but it is actually creative. Pruners examine the plants to locate unwanted branches, imagining the plants without this or that branch, imagining how it will grow, seeing what needs to be done. Like a haircut, it's easy to take it off, hard to put back on, so pruners know when to quit.
God knows how to prune so that growth and fruit-bearing are enhanced. The problem is being the “prunee” is usually not very pleasant, either for pastors or congregations. It’s hard to see how losing something we thought we wanted or needed to have can make us better disciples. The status quo is too easy to cling too, even when we understand that God has better things in store.
But we bear fruit only when we submit to pruning. If we do not do that we do not abide in Christ. And that lead us to the sharp, serious warning of verse six: “Whoever does not abide in me is cast out like a dried branch; such branches are gathered, cast into the fire, and burned.”
A vine branch that does not abide in the main vine, or stay connected to it, is one that has stop receiving nourishment from the main vine and so dried up and died. Vine dressers try to prevent this, but if a branch does it, there is no solution except to tear it off and throw it away. The deadening can spread elsewhere. So vine dressers cut them off and in Jesus day they burned them as fuel.
Jesus’ warning is one of the harshest in the New Testament. Individuals, congregations, or whole denominations can wander away from God, fail to abide in Christ, and suffer the grave consequences. Jesus’ words are matter of fact and severe. God is serious about the work of his church now and its salvation in eternity. God’s rescue of us from death was no halfway measure, and he accepts no half-hearted measures in return.
A Methodist lady named Elaine Olsen watched a wrecking crew demolish three houses in North Carolina damaged by Hurricane Floyd so badly they couldn’t be occupied again. Two homes went down quickly. The crew moved to the third one. Elaine wrote,
Vince and I walked around the house for one last glance. It was then that I saw them, the last and final living remnant from 104 Lower Street. Vines, clinging beautifully to the white brick chimney, reaching almost to the top. Moments later, the first blow came from the hammer.
I watched this flimsy structure wobble and fall into pieces. But the chimney with the vines took longer. It was the last to fall. It was as if those vines, encircling the chimney, provided protection of some sort. And as the blows crashed, I strained to see the green ropes as the chimney fell. The house was down. I went across the street to survey the remains.
Tears came, and through my blurred vision I spotted a most unusual gift, green, unbroken, dusty, yet somehow reaching far above the pile that was the end of this one-hundred-year-old memory. Life reaching forth, calling for notice. A garden of mercy amidst a pile of surrender. Hope springing to life in the middle of crucifixion.
A vine. A journey. A weeping. A surrender. A springing forth. A resurrection. A promise to remain until the end, to fall alongside in the midst of the blows, to rise above the dust and bring forth the vibrancy of the green.
Sometimes it takes a demolition to see the green. Sometimes our brokenness brings such a death that all that remains is that Vine, forever alive, forever reaching, forever protecting. Reminding us that life issues forth from the surrender.
“May you sense the clinging of the vine,” Elaine concluded. “May you walk with Christ into that garden of surrender, remembering all the while” that life issues from ashes.( )
Pruning at the hand of God while we abide in the vine of Christ is a form of practice, perhaps, for the consummation of eternity. Death and the resurrection the Scriptures promise us are a logical extension of the pattern of our lives: the old passes away and the new is born.
The difficulties we have in our cycles of being pruned and growing may come from our need to control the process. But we are amateurs. We don’t know how to do the job. So we prune and cut and pull and burn blindly. Yet we have to surrender to God’s cultivation to bear fruit, and we have to stay entangled with our brothers and sisters in faith to the vine, which is our life, our Savior. Apart from him we can do nothing. Connected to the vine, we bear good fruit.
The right thing for us to be is a branch on the vine we know as Christ. We are a people who believe in our hearts that Jesus rose from the dead and we confess that Jesus is Lord, and so we have been grafted by God onto the vine of Christ. May it ever be so, and may we bear much fruit.
