Our scripture reading from the gospel of John tells of Jesus teaching his disciples about remaining connected to him in order to grow strong in their Christian lives. He used an illustration that people of his day would have understood easily. Grapevines were readily handy and they were most likely grown by most homes as a source of food and drink. The disciples, who were once boys, would have tended to the family’s vines and would know experientially the right ways to trim, groom, prune, and train a vine. Once again in teaching the disciples, Jesus made a nod of recognition as the beginning point. Just about all of them would have experience with a grapevine and how to make the greatest and most fruitful harvest.
Many of us don’t live in an agrarian society. We don’t farm our acres everyday but many of us have had experiences with gardening. We have spent time building up the soil to make it rich in the nutrients it needs to grow flowers or vegetables. Some of us have even tried our hands at grapes. But just about everyone has tried their hands at tomatoes.
We buy those little plants filled with promise of super huge beefsteak tomatoes or juicy little grape tomatoes. We gently place them in our cars, drive slowly and carefully home so nothing spills and no leaf is broken . We want to show the world that we are capable of growing world-class tomatoes.
Next we prepare the soil by digging it up and mixing in fertilizer, and maybe even manure of some sort because we are growing award winning tomatoes. We can almost hear the announcement at the county fair for the largest, sweetest tomato in the county as they call your name. We plant the plants next to tomato stakes because we are going to train them to grow high, broad, and with fruit that bends their boughs.
The results, well, only you can tell what the results were. Either you had such a great harvest that you gave them away or like me, you waited for someone to bring you a bag from their plentiful harvest because your plants failed. As people say, some of us have green thumbs and some of us have black thumbs. I will make no further confessions about my thumbs.
If we apply all that we have learned in planting our gardens to this passage, it is much easier to get the spiritual point of Christ’s teaching. Apply your experience to the words and you will gain more from what Jesus has to say. Let’s look at this passage from that point of view.
Jesus identified three players in the story. The gardener who was the Father; himself, who was the main branch that comes up out of the ground; and the branches, which are you and me. Let’s begin with the gardener, the Father, and his role in the story. The gardener begins by choosing the soil. In the gospel of Mark 4:8, Jesus told the simple story of a farmer that went out to sow seed. The seed on the pathway never germinated. The seed on the rocky ground sprung up and withered in the sun because it had no root system. The seed in the thorns was choked out. Mark 4:8 says, “Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew, and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.” If the gardener wants good growth then he chooses good soil. The grape vine needs good soil so the roots can extend down and out equal to what is seen above the ground. The Father chose good soil expecting it to produce bountiful fruit.
Our faith is set in good ground. It is filled with everything we need to grow good fruit. The second epistle of Peter says, “His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires”(2 Peter 1:3-4).
To put it in gardening terms, you are planted in good, rich, dark soil. Everything is there for you to grow. It is into that soil that the Father has planted the vine. The main stalk rising from the ground grows up a wooden stake. The main stalk pulls the nutrients from the soil. No branch can exist without it. No branch can bear fruit without it. If you were to cut it off, then even the healthiest branch would not survive. Every branch must be attached to the vine. Jesus is that vine. Without him, you have no spiritual life. Without him, you will produce no fruit of the spirit.
Remember your tomato plants. Occasionally you would bump a branch and it would bend and break part of the way through. A caring, nurturing person would lift it into place, maybe even put a stick under it to hold it up but in reality, the full strength of the ground’s nutrients would never get to the buds or the small, green baby tomatoes. It would die.
As a pastor, I often meet people who are like that half-broken branch. They want to grow but somehow life’s missteps brush a rough leg by it and it snaps. It tries to grow and produce fruit but it is fruitless until the gardener makes the correct repairs. In many ways, the season of Lent that we passed through was a time when the gardener, the Father, was mending us and healing us so that we could produce fruit once again.
In other words, we must stay attached to the vine. We need to stay attached to Jesus. Everything we need to produce fruit in our spiritual lives flows out of the vine into the branch. As branches though, we must not think that we will immediately grow big, juicy grapes. The gardener has a lot of work to do. First of all, it takes time for the vine to produce branches that bear fruit. As a branch, remember the branches are you and me; we may not produce fruit for a few years. There are lots of things from our former lives before Christ that may hold us back or stunt our growth.
To use a fishers of men analogy, in the church, we like our fish cleaned, battered, and fried but when Christ sends out his fishers of men, the fish they catch are smelly and fighting the change all the way to shore. When you meet Christ you often have habits or addictions that you have spent years developing and that is what Jesus talked about when he said, “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit.”
At first that seems as if he is saying that you are thrown away and condemned. But once again, you have to stay in the story. You have ride with the grape vine analogy. The role of the gardener is to help us to bear fruit. One of the ways the Father does that is by pruning. He prunes from our branch, the little shoots that suck off the life from your spiritual journey. He prunes off the things that are part of your old, dead life and throws them in the fire. Yes, you may be fresh on your spiritual journey. You look around this church building and see a lot happy, growing, thriving, fruitful Christians. But if you were to ask that cleaned, battered, and fried fish if he or she was always like that they you would tell you stories that might curl your toes. We all get pruned by the Father. We may not like it when it happens. We may not want it but once we have made it to the point of seeing the wonderful growth of fruit in our lives and then in others then we can see his grace, mercy, and wisdom.
Finally, Jesus gives us the greater goal as to why we are pruned to be fruitful. He says, “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”
Now, go and bear fruit.
Amen.