Fifth Sunday of Easter: April 28, 2024
Abiding in Love
The Rev. Nat Johnson
Acts 8:26-40
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8
Psalm 22:24-30
In the dominant culture in which we live, the individual is the center of existence. We operate in social structures that are undergirded by a bootstrap ideology that sees individuals as the source and center of truth, authority, and success. This kind of ideology has been woven into the fabric of our social, political, and religious structures. Across our media outlets, millionaires and billionaires are described as “self-made.” Identity is an individual reality, forged in the crucible of our autonomy. We are taught and conditioned to decry dependence, to see it as moral weakness and failure. Our religious and spiritual lives are undergirded by notions of the “personal and private.” And in this context, we see and experience things like difference as a threat, leading to ways of living that turn everything outside of the self into a battle ground for maintaining control and fighting for our individual rights. It leads us to operate with a mentality of fear and scarcity, which in turn leads us to habits of manipulation and hoarding.
Our Gospel reading this morning cuts across this ideology, exposing it as utterly anti- Christ and anti-gospel. Jesus says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches… Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me, you can do nothing.” In his agricultural context, Jesus’ image of vine and branches calls to mind the grapevine, with the branches growing up and out from the vine, intertwined with one another in a beautiful, tangled mess. As a metaphor for the Christian life, Jesus’ words suggest that the individualism of our social, political, economic, and religious contexts is incompatible with the life to which God calls us in Christ. Christianity is not a religion that lends itself well to the idea that “God helps those who help themselves.”
If we’re honest with ourselves, this is a difficult teaching to hear, to digest, because it implies that our lives are not our own. Everything that you do, that I do – all the ways I engage with others and with the world around me affects more than just me, myself, and I. In the context of Jesus’ metaphor, this means that the point of my spirituality and life of faith is not ultimately about me. It is about the fruit that my life – bound and intertwined with the other branches – bears as it draws nutrients from the vine. And there is a consequence to being fruitless, Jesus tells us. Branches that bear no fruit are removed and thrown away; they wither and die and are used as fuel for the fire.
We must ring a note of caution here, too. Far too often in the history of the Church, these words have been used to delineate “true believers” from “false believers.” We have seen in this description the justification for systems of dividing people along the lines of who’s in and who’s out, who the true branches are and who will be cast aside in the pruning of the branches. This passage in particular has been used as a scare-tactic to threaten punishment and eternal damnation if one choses not become a follower of Jesus (or, perhaps, even the right kind of follower of Jesus). But this line of interpretation misses the point of what John intends to communicate with Jesus’ words. Jesus is not concerned with defining who’s in and who’s out, nor is he threatening his disciples with punishment. Rather, he’s naming the reality that the disciples’ capacity to bear fruit in their common life is contingent on the nutrients the branches receive from the vine. And for the writer of our Gospel, this capacity is nothing less than life – John names this reality over and over again in his narrative: what Jesus offers is not a program. It is not an ideology or a doctrinal outline. What Jesus offers is life, true life, abundant life, abiding life.
In the larger context of our current passage, Jesus is sitting with his closest disciples at an intimate dinner. He has been trying to get them to understand the searing reality of the looming cross and the implications this will have on his disciples. He has been trying to prepare them for what is coming and the words he offers them are not threats of punishment or a program of division. Jesus knows that the events which are about to unfold will shake his disciples’ faith and will ultimately cause them to desert him. In the words he speaks to them, Jesus offers them an anchor, encouraging them to hold fast in the face of the storm their about to face.
But Jesus’ words also bear on more than just the immediate future; they point beyond the imminent circumstances of his betrayal to a time when the disciples will be commissioned to carry on the work of reconciliation that Jesus began. All that Jesus taught in ministry pointed to the reality he would enact when, after his resurrection, he would extend once again the hand of fellowship to those who were about to desert and betray him. And it is this ministry of reconciliation first extended to the disciples that they then are commissioned to take up, to carry on, to bear witness to; to live as testimonies of the Good News of Jesus Christ that in him there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.
“Abide in me as I abide in you,” Jesus says. Just as the branches of a vine cannot bear fruit unless they are attached to the vine, to the source of nutrients, so the disciples will not be able to carry on the ministry of Christ apart from remaining in relationship with him. And the expectation that is set with this image is that the branches, the disciples, receive life and nutrients and sustenance from the vine for the very purpose of bearing fruit.
The analogy of “bearing fruit” is used in a variety of ways and contexts in Scripture and has been picked up by mystics and spiritualists to describe the growth and development of virtuous qualities in the Christian’s life. We often equate the notion of “bearing fruit” with one of Paul’s lists of the fruits of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. But this is not the connection that John makes. For John, bearing fruit refers to the generative nature of the gospel, the spread of liberation from sin and death as we respond to the ever-deepening invitation of God to embody the Good News of Jesus Christ. When Jesus exhorts his disciples to abide in him, he is not admonishing them to adhere to a programmatic to-do list. Rather, he is telling them, and us, that the life- source in which we must abide, remain, reside in, is tangibly defined by the love with which Jesus loves us.
God’s love is not sentimentality; it is not motivated by familial likeness or affinity. God’s love is the very fabric of God’s being, manifested in God’s free choice to not be God apart from us. It is characterized by sacrifice, by forgiveness, by fecundity. It is the very source of life for all that exists and if we are to accept God’s invitation to participate in the divine nature then we must abide in that love, allow it to permeate our very being so that we might in turn become conduits of that love in the world.
The writer of 1 John compels us to recognize the God who is Love as both the source and the aim for all the kinds of loves we experience. Our capacity to love in any way is the clue to the reality that we can love only because we are ourselves beloved of God, and it is this realization that breaks all barriers to love that are founded in fear. If the God who is love, who created all things, who sustains all things, who is refashioning all things according to the pattern of divine love, if this God loves me, then there is nothing to fear in sharing the same kind of love with those around me.
But it is so much more than that! Because this love that John speaks about is not the same as affinity, it is not grounded in attraction or sameness or likeness; it is generative and requires more than just “me,” more than just an aggregate of “me’s.” Its scope is cosmic and empathic rather than individualistic and narcissistic. God’s love is expansive, drawing all things into itself so that all things might reproduce according to the pattern of the love that sustains it.
“Beloved, let us love one another because love is from God.” Scholars have debated what the writer of this epistle meant by these words. Who, exactly, makes up the “one another?” Some commentators think this command is inclusive only of those who profess to be believers in Christ. They see here a link back to the new command Jesus gives his disciples just a few chapters earlier in our gospel today and they see there too a command that is limited to those who are counted among the people of God. Again, we return to a theme with which we opened, the divisive nature of determining who’s in and who’s out, of who qualifies for and deserves the love that we are commanded to share. The generative nature of the gospel, challenges us to recognize that the love that produces and reproduces according to its divine pattern, cannot be hoarded and contained in a community that protects and polices its boundaries of inclusion. Abiding in Christ, abiding in Christ’s love, will inevitably lead to continually re-defining the boundaries of inclusion in an ever more expansive direction.
As disciples of Christ, we bear fruit every time we love beyond the social, political, economic, and (even!) religious categories of worth and value that are created in our context of individualism and division. We bear fruit every time we step out of the familiar and the comfortable and engage in mutual relationship with those who are unlike us, every time that we demolish that line that determines “who’s in and who’s out.” We bear fruit every time we challenge the individualism that permeates our culture and break the barriers of isolation; every time we recognize that our very beings are connected and intertwined with one another.
I wonder, dear People of St Peter’s, what this image of the vine and branches inspires in your imaginations today? What fruit are we bearing in our common life? What branches need to be pruned to make room for new life? I wonder what boundaries we’ve set for ourselves in our actions of love and welcome, and what fears are keeping us from crossing those boundaries. My prayer for us today, dear friends, is that we would be so attuned to the God who is love that we would cut away all barriers that limit the expansive and generative nature of that divine love, so that we might experience the blossoming of new fruit, the growth of our community, and the deepening of our faith as we live it out in love.
May God give us the desire to bear the fruit of the gospel and empower us to do the same! Amen.