“I am the vine, you are the branches.
... apart from me you can do nothing.” You’ve probably heard those words
before. They’re sometimes used in church liturgies.
It’s a line from the scriptures,
John 15:5, a saying of Jesus. Maybe you’ve never given that line much thought. Pulled
out of the context of the scriptures — and out of the context of the culture from
which they came — those words have little meaning. It’s a verse about
grapevines, and the grapes they bear.
They mean much more than that, of
course. John includes these words in his gospel as part of a lengthy body of
material known as the “Farewell Discourses.” Jesus and his disciples are
already in Jerusalem. Their path is leading them ever closer to the Garden of
Gethsemane, where he will be arrested.
John’s gospel isn’t a straight
chronological narrative. Unlike the other gospel-writers, he arranges his material
for maximum meaning — not so much as a historian might do it, but as a
philosopher. It’s not likely Jesus spoke all these teachings that go on for
chapter after chapter on any single occasion. What John has probably done is to
take a whole lot of sayings of Jesus and group them together in a single
speech, much as Plato gathered the teachings of Socrates and presented them in
a series of dialogues.
No one has any problem with Plato
doing that. No one thinks his dialogues pretend to be a chronological account
of Socrates’ life, put together as a reporter assembles a news story. Why
should we hold John to a different standard?
This saying about the vine and the
branches is one John considered important enough to include. It’s more than
just a throwaway illustration. It’s a rich image that teaches a lot about the
life of faith.
To fully appreciate that deep
meaning, though, we’ve got to get inside the illustration — which is hard for
us because we don’t live in a place where grapevines are part of everyday life.
Helping the vines bear fruit
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