Easter 5, Year B | John 15:1-8
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
April 28, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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When I was growing up, our house had a long, narrow lot roughly an acre in size. I was responsible for mowing, which needed several hours each Saturday from March through November. Most of the yard was flat and grassy, taking more time than effort to tend, but on either side grew what had become the bane of my existence. Toward the back on the west was a small patch of blackberry brambles leaning in from beside a neighbor’s shed. On the east side, the entire fence line was overgrown with a thick, prolific vine which I assumed was related to the ivy that loved to climb the walls of our brick house. I felt like nature was constantly allied against me with this two-front invasion. The vines especially frustrated me. They seemed determined to consume everything—bushes, trees, even the lawn itself. I battled their constantly creeping tendrils throughout junior high and high school, struggling to untangle them from their chain link trellis, carefully tracing each branch farther and farther back in hopes of finally striking a fatal blow to the whole plant. It was largely futile, since the fence was topped with barbed wire and the root was hidden somewhere on the neighbor’s lot, but I did my best.
Once I finally had the eastern front somewhat under control, I turned my attention to the overgrown blackberries. Emerging from our basement armed with a pair of large snips and some thick leather gloves, I vowed those brambles would never scratch me up again. I went so far as to stretch under the fence onto the other neighbor’s property to chop them off all the way down at the base. Thorns finally out of sight and mystery vines tentatively at bay, mowing became much easier, and I didn’t really give much more thought to either for the rest of the year.
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In today’s Gospel reading, we join Jesus and his followers shortly after the Last Supper. Judas had already left to initiate his betrayal, and as the remaining disciples make their way toward the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus summarizes what he most wants them to remember, which is his command to agape—to love one another not just in their hearts or by offering thoughts and prayers but through genuine physical action.
Over this and the past few Sundays you may have noticed the frequent repetition of one of John’s favorite words: “abide.” It’s been showing up in both our Gospel and Epistle readings for several weeks now. For me, the concept behind “abiding” has a kind of passive quality. It conjures up images of waiting for a bus or, more positively, settling into one’s home each evening. There’s a certain sense of commonality or even boredom to it. But the way Jesus uses it, “abide” is far less static than the images that naturally come to my mind. Just as John’s “love” is more of an activity than a mental state, to “abide” requires significantly more effort than simply becoming comfortable in one’s neighborhood or leaning into the Psalmist’s famous adage to “be still and know.”
“Abiding” does indeed involve staying put, but the way Jesus is using it, it isn’t static. This is a word of intention and commitment, associated more with military occupation or settling a frontier than simply becoming comfortable in one’s own neighborhood. It carries the idea of embedding oneself, of standing your ground or struggling to maintain a position, not simply dwelling somewhere in uninterrupted tranquility. In the context of looming betrayal and crucifixion, Jesus is likely using it something more along the lines of “stick to” than what we expect from “abide in:” “You all stick to me, and I’ll stick with you.”
Compounding the active nature of “abiding,” the branches are showing a surprising amount of other initiative here. Biblical Greek uses two words for negation. One is objective, a statement of fact, like where Jesus says a “branch cannot bear fruit by itself.” End of story. No root, no fruit. It’s simply not possible. It doesn’t show up very well in English, but when he continues with “unless it abides in the vine,” he’s using the other term, which is subjective. A subjective negative suggests not simple fact but includes an element of perception or volition. So the branch doesn’t seem to be limited by some outside factor here. It’s not that it simply doesn’t or can’t bear fruit. It isn’t necessarily weakened by disease, nor is it innately infertile. The way Jesus is talking, the branch won’t grow any grapes. It’s actively refusing.[1]
So imagine a branch emerging from its root. As the root feeds it, the branch naturally grows farther away from the trunk of the vine. It matures and starts sending out its own tendrils, its leaves partnering with those elsewhere to feed the rest of the plant, root included. Everything grows in harmony, branch and leaves, root and grapes. Energy is active and flowing throughout, but the appearance is completely effortless, a healthy exchange whose benefits extend beyond the plant to the world around it.
However, at some point we come to a branch that forgets about anything other than itself and turns from the cooperative nature of production into simple consumption.
Going back to my old yard, I was neither surprised nor too concerned when the blackberries began tentatively reaching over the fence again the following spring. Part of why I had put up with the brambles for so many years was that I enjoyed eating what little I could collect from the sparse array of tiny fruit they usually offered. That summer, however, the recently tamed vines surprised me, practically erupting with blackberries. They were juicy and rich and well worth the scratches it took to gather. My hack job must have relieved the root of the need to feed an excess of old, woody vines, so the plant put its restored energy toward growing a quality crop instead.
That fall I saw the same thing happening along the fence across the yard—in fact, that’s when I discovered those hated vines were, in fact, grapes! I’d never seen a trace of fruit on them before, but I could now watch the clusters ripening as I tended the lawn. Being wild, they weren’t remotely tasty, but I felt far less malice toward the plant once I realized it did indeed have a purpose beyond clogging our mower and overrunning our lawn.
There’s no question those old vines had become a waste. As extensive and heavy as they had grown, they became presumptive about their root, treating it more like a slave than their source of life. It generously continued to send them water and nutrients, but they spent all that energy on themselves, making their particular branch as large and expansive as possible. I genuinely don’t know if those old branchers had been or were even still capable of producing fruit—if so, it was well hidden. Once pruned, however, the branches seemed to remember why they existed in the first place: to grow grapes that birds and animals would want to carry away in their stomachs so the seeds could establish themselves in places where the original vine simply couldn’t reach.
And so with us. Like plants, we grow and spread and produce fruit and, sometimes, harden ourselves off, becoming woody and stiff, focusing either on reanimating the glories of the past or enforcing our own agenda to the point where we become inflexible and even begin to choke off what little life still flows through us. But it is possible to cut back, to return to the root.
I think of one of our locally native plants, the sacred datura. During the summer, it’s a bush with broad leaves and large white flowers—you can see several beginning to grow beside the road to Dripping Springs right now. But as winter comes, the branches all begin to shrivel and die. By spring, there’s often no sign that the plant had ever existed. Yet the root is still there and still alive. As the weather warms and water once again streams over it, the datura bursts from the ground, once again regrowing and rebuilding back into a full bush, a miraculous cycle that repeats year after year after year.
Life is made of challenges, things that cut us down or cause us to shrivel to the point that everyone might think we’re dead. Sometimes those are external and beyond our control. Sometimes, even if we don’t like to admit it, we do them to ourselves. Life always involves change, and attempting to prevent natural cycles only prolongs pain. But our life is in the root. When we stick to the root, when we turn to Christ as our primary focus, example, and guide, no matter how difficult things get, life will eventually continue to flow. So even in the midst of pruning, in seasons of loss and defeat, we trust that, even when everyone assumes that we’re dead and gone, although there may be no sign we ever existed, the life is in the root, and, with our connection to Christ restored, we will rise again.
[1] The same structure is taking place in our Epistle. In I John 4:8 & 20, the texts states that someone who won’t love their sibling neither does nor can love God. | Back to the Gospel, though, another intriguing detail suggests that once the branches are gathered and dried, they light themselves on fire!