Fifth Sunday of Easter; 28 April 2024; Easter 5B (RCL); Acts 8:26-40; Psalm 22:24-30; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8.
The image of the vine is a guiding metaphor in the Old Testament for Israel. Psalm 80, a psalm of complaint in which Israel questions why God has not restored Jerusalem, speaks of Israel as a vine: You have brought a vine out of Egypt; you cast out the nations and planted it. Then after describing God’s care for the vine, the psalmist goes on to complain: Why have you broken down its wall, so that all who pass by pluck off its grapes. And then begs: Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven; behold and tend this vine; preserve what your right hand has planted.
Isaiah 5 is an extended poem on the vine. God has planted a vineyard, put a wall around it, dug a wine pit in it, put up a tower to guard it. Then God complains about Jerusalem that after that work, God looked for grapes but found only sour grapes; God looked for justice but found only bloodshed, for righteousness but heard only an outcry. The prophet specifies that the vineyard is Israel and Judah.
John wrote Jesus’ “I AM the vine” speech against this well-known backdrop. Consistent with much else in John’s Gospel, Jesus and/or the Johannine community replace some aspect of the Temple and its cult. Jesus is the new Israel, and we are branches of that new reality. Paul uses a similar image when he speaks in his letter to the Romans of Gentile Christians as wild olive branches grafted on to a domesticated olive tree.
And several of the prophets speak of the restored kingdom as a time when a person shall plant a vineyard and enjoy its fruit, or planting a fig tree and sitting in its shade, rather than one planting and another enjoying the fruits. Wine is connected with fruitfulness, righteousness (a balanced community with enough for everyone), prosperity, and the like. Wine is also necessary for any sacrificial meal, and along with sacrificed, served the purpose of establishing kinship (Jesus’ first miracle in John is to change 120 gallons of water into fine wine at a wedding — a feast which establishes a new kinship unit).
All of these things come into play in Jesus’ “I AM the vine” speech. A new community is established among the followers of Jesus. A feature of this new community is the mutual abiding or indwelling of Jesus and the community. The word abide appears 14 times between the passage from the First Epistle of John and the passage in John’s Gospel (unless I lost count somewhere). But it is important to note that every second person pronoun in the Gospel passage is in the plural. We could even translate, “if my word abides among you.” The preposition en in Greek means among just as often as it means in.
It’s the second to the last sentence of the Gospel that trips people up. “If you abide in me and my words abide among you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” Many will ask, “So, why haven’t I won the lottery yet?” But it is the community that can ask, and the If is central to this sentence. If you all abide in me and my words abide among you — that’s the condition. A community engaged in Jesus’ words can ask for what it wants.
The following sentence suggests the kind of thing that such a community will ask for: “My father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.” John does not specify what bearing fruit looks like, but the Old Testament background certainly supplies grist for the mill (or wine for the press). Fruitfulness suggests righteousness, sharing of plenty and that whole field of metaphor. A community engaged with Jesus’ words, seeking to have them abide within the community will ask for that kind of fruitfulness.