Year B / Eastertide / Fifth Sunday
Readings: Acts 9.26-31 / Psalm 22.26-27, 28, 30, 31-21 (R/v 26a) / 1 John 3.18-24 / John 15.1-8
My Dad loved to garden. When we lived in Changi, he planted gardenias, bougainvillea, hibiscus, Japanese primrose (my favourite) and even papaya.
He would teach my siblings and I to dig and plant, and to get our hands dirty as we weeded and fertilized. He taught us about seeding and watering, about planting according to the wet and dry seasons. He showed us how to graft a desirable trait, say a branch from a particular fruit or flower, onto another plant with stronger roots and stock.
Though I don't have a green thumb, everything I know about gardens and gardening comes from him. He taught me to like gardens and to appreciate the hard work gardening is.
Like every good gardener, Dad knew the value and necessity of pruning. Cutting away what is dead, unwanted and overgrown is hard work. As it is hunting for and destroying slugs. But he did all this to prune, prune, prune the plants and shrubs: not just to keep our garden neat, but to let it flourish and be lush with new growth.
Pruning is a good metaphor for how we ought to let Jesus shape us so that our relationship with him can bear good and abundant fruit. This kind of spiritual pruning involves courage to hear Jesus’ call to conversion and generosity to say, “yes, I wish to be healed.”
But don’t we find ourselves struggling when we give Jesus permission to prune us to grow anew in our Christian life and faith? Struggling to turn our backs on bad habits and addictions? Wrestling to remove the self-centered, self-righteous, self-serving ways we live? Grappling to clear out those parts of our lives that are dead to Jesus’ love?
I’d like to think that sayings “yes” to being pruned is also saying “yes” to the grace that struggling, wrestling, grappling with Jesus promises us: that Jesus’ pruning will make something divinely better of our human lives.
Why grace? Because these struggles involve the necessary and life-giving work of gradually surrendering ourselves into Jesus’ life and love. This is how we can begin to root out our vices and to plant God’s virtues in our lives. This interpretation of Jesus’ teaching is about the call to conversion so that we can live more fruitful Christian lives. A conversion we have to choose by remaining connected to Jesus or by rejecting him.
But there’s another, richer lesson that Jesus teaches us today. It is about the beauty of how abiding in God is our true life. Easter joy is about knowing this truth, and living it out fully.
We need Jesus to help us convert our lives and to enjoy the fruitful life God wishes us to have. But we will experience this good life fully when we respond to Jesus’ call to abide in him. Our readings throughout the Easter season echo this call in the constant invitation they make to us: that only in Jesus will you and I fully live in God. And this life is ever growing.
Last Sunday, Jesus gave us the image of the good shepherd. His words and ministry brought this image to life. In doing so, Jesus taught us that God’s saving action is primary to who God is and what God does in our lives.
Today Jesus gives us the image of the vine and branches. It describes the kind of relationship we ought to have with God through him, with him and in him. A symbiotic relationship like the vine and the branches have: they abide in one another for life.
This image is indeed hope-filled because it speaks of how God’s primary action in our lives -- to save -- isn’t finished. “God’s action is ongoing; it is pregnant, growing, life-giving. Jesus, the vine doesn’t go anywhere; he patiently, peacefully provides strength and sustenance for us, the branches. The branches hold fast to the vine, letting life flow through them, bearing fruit. They are free to grow because the vine supports them.”*
The promise of the branches abiding in the vine is the freedom to live freely and fruitfully. As an Easter people, this is the kind of life the risen Jesus bestows on us to live in and through his Spirit.
Such a life must matter to us: it testifies to how God in Jesus is indeed the source of life for us; God will raise us from the dead as God raised Jesus into eternal life. This is why we should abide in Jesus: through him we come to abide in God. And when we abide in God, we come to experience and know how God’s action for our wellbeing and happiness always precedes our actions. This is why we can believe that God’s actions always save: God attends to our every need even before we ask God to intervene.
If you agree with me that God is always present in us and for us, and that God is always laboring for our salvation, then we have to acknowledge this fact of Christian life: that our actions do not create the conditions for our free and fruitful lives. Rather, our actions only enable the growth that life in God first produces and always enables.
Isn’t this a lot like gardening? Gardeners only aid the growth of plants and shrubs. What makes a seed grow is the life source in the soil, in the air, in rain and moisture, in the ground.
My Dad never taught us this insight explicitly; he simply repeated what Mom always taught us about living each day: observe, record and take note. This is how my siblings and I learnt that there is indeed growth in the mysterious process that transforms an ugly brown bulb into a glowing scarlet amaryllis.
Yes, growth is all about that one breath of life -- never finished, always evolving, forever bestowing new possibilities to grow, to live, to fruit. And you and I are also grafted into this one breath of life, as are the unfortunate slugs in the garden.
This one breath of life we know, we believe, we profess to be life in God.
Perhaps, this is why the ancient monks interpreted Jesus’ teaching about pruning and abiding as the good and necessary work of “soul keeping” we must do with Jesus daily.
We would be wise then to keep in mind that today Jesus tells us five times to bear fruit in him, and eight times to remain in him. How many more times, then, must you and I let Jesus continue to shape us to bear good and abundant fruit for God and for one another?
*Katie Munnik, “Abiding is a wonderful verb”
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore on 3 May 2015
photo: 2paragraph.wordpress.com (Internet)
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