Easter 5 2009  Vine and Branches

The beginning of thee gospel of John tells us that Jesus is the word, the controlling idea of life, and that he was the light shining on people so that they could see who they were.  It further states in vs. 3 that all things came into being through him, and that not one thing had its being except through him.

This really gets at some thing that has become very important to me and my faith.  What is the depth of my soul and the truth of my being.

The God who creates time and space out of nothing also brings being out of non-being.  Abraham in his call was asked to leave his past being and to change what he knew himself to be into being what and who God called him to be.

Calling stories in the scriptures share a common thread of being called out of who you were into the wilderness there to meet God who re-creates you new, born again and this time built on God’s being itself.

Jesus’ father is the giver of life and love.  Jesus demonstrated this on the cross when he gave himself to us, to show us the truth about ourselves.  He poured out his life on us to show how we must all give up where we came from so that God can take us to His new place. All the movement is away from, tribe, clan and self.  “Jesus said: who are my mother and my brothers and sisters?  Those who follow me.” 

It strikes me that one of the greatest mistakes of modern society is what I will call the myth of the individual.  The pure psychological self, standing alone, surveying the world with its rational, empirical analysis, as the measure of all things is totally assumed by our modern culture.  This is the polar opposite of today’s lesson.  Jesus’ discourse on the vine and branches.  Individual identity is nearly always criticized in the bible as snatching at and grabbing for what rightfully belongs to God.  Jesus was not independent , but totally dependent on his father.

This is illustrated in the parable of the prodigal where the youngest son grabs for himself what belongs to his Father and then writhers and dies cut off from the source of his life, His Father.  Realizing he is without substance, he comes home to re-attach himself to his Father and to life.  So if our being and self is not internally generated, no wonder we are so thinly constituted.  No wonder we feel washed out.  Because we have had our substance cut off.  We lack spiritual density.  This myth of the modern individual autonomous and independent casts our quest for God wrongly.  We seek God, we seek to know him.  By contrast the true ground of solid being and substance is to be known by God.  Seeing ourselves according to the word and light given and shined on us by God.  The true light which alone is the source of true vision.

A proper understanding of today’s lesson of the vine and branches can lead us back from the brink of being thinly constituted and self reliant to the dense and abundant life of God.  Man is not the measure of all things, God is the measure.  Jesus tells us he is the vine and his father is the vine grower.  He cuts away the branches that do not bear fruit and prunes those that do.  In both cases the Father negates the status quo.  Jesus is telling us that we have already been pruned by having been exposed to the gospel’s living word.  Pruned we have already forfeited our natural cultural form of existence and we can no longer just go back where we came from.

Put another way if we try to go-it-alone we risk the nothingness that we have seen before us all too clearly. If we cut ourselves off from the source of our being we might not recognize it immediately until we begin to whither and die.  Like the modern world is withering because it is cut off from the source of life, we too face withering and lack of density if we are separated from our Father.

Let us hear the word and bask in the light, so that we do not claim sovereign right over our lives and spend them as we choose.  The determined resentful choice to go-it-alone and to do-it-my-way is a recipe for the squandering of the gift of being.  Instead all that is asked is a response of gratitude and for an equal willingness go give our being away after the example set for us by God in Christ. 

So when you find yourself withering, make a homeward journey, and say to my Father and your Father.  What is it that I call I?  God has given me this I and I owe him not merely all I have but everything I am.  Everything is a gift.  We who have received the gifts have our origin in the one who gave himself to us.