5th Sunday of Easter 2024
Acts 9:26-31; 1 John 3:18-24; John 15:1-8
Would you recognise a vine if you saw one? I would—provided it had bunches of grapes hanging from it: otherwise I wouldn’t have a clue. In Holy Family Church, Morecambe, now, sadly closed, there was a set of tabernacle veils with leaves embroidered on them. To me, they looked like ivy, but I was assured that they were vine leaves.
That was appropriate, because vines produce grapes, which in turn produce wine, which is transformed into the Blood of Christ, the Eucharist, which, under the appearances of bread, is contained in the tabernacle. Thus, vines have a deeply Eucharistic significance.
And we, says Jesus, are branches of the vine, parts of Him who is the true vine, the vine which ultimately bears fruit in His Blood, just as we are parts of His Body, which is both the Church and the food of the Church. Our Eucharistic union with Him is both integral and intimate, and we will never exhaust its meaning, as we reflect on the mystery of His Body and Blood.
As branches of the vine, He tells us, we are called to bear fruit. How are we to do that? Well, how do the branches of any vine bear fruit? They do that simply by being themselves. The life of the parent vine passes through them, and so the life of Jesus passes through us. It is not our doing: it all comes from the main stem, which is Jesus.
Our calling then is to be fully receptive to the life of Jesus passing through us, to be conduits of that life. How do we do that? St. John explains in our Second Reading: “We believe in the name of [God’s] Son Jesus Christ, and we love one another as He told us to”. It’s a doddle.
Or is it? What does belief in the name of Jesus entail? It is more than accepting His biography: it is recognising Him as the source of our life, and allowing Him to live in us, being open to His grace and to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Just as the sap from the main stem is the source of the branch’s life, so must the grace of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit be the source of our life. As St Paul wrote: “I live; no, not I, but Christ who lives in me”. We must be open always to the promptings of grace, seeking always to conform our lives to the presence and the leading of God who dwells in us.
As part of that response to grace, we must “love one another as He told us to”. Is that a doddle? Anybody who has been part of a family, a religious community, a parish, will roll their eyes at that suggestion. Those who are closest to us create the greatest friction with us. It can be far easier to love the people whom we do not know, whom we will never meet. People love their idols, whether these be sporting personalities, rock stars, film stars or whoever. Those who marry them have a very different experience of them, and few such marriages survive. “Love hurts” as one well known song declares.
There is still more: Our Lord tells us to love our enemies. Somehow we have to love that difficult person up the street, and Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, the editor of the Daily Mail, the militant atheist who constantly attacks religion, and all those other people whose world view is at odds with ours. We may disagree with them profoundly, we may wish their power and influence to be broken, but we must pray for them, desire their conversion, long for them to be filled with the love of the Holy Spirit.
What, though, do we make of the demand that we bear fruit? Do you perhaps feel, particularly in these days when the Church appears to be in decline, when the name of Jesus is less known and less believed in, when your own children may have rejected the values you sought to give them, that you have failed, that your efforts, your life have been fruitless?
I remember a lady coming to confession and claiming that she had failed. Her daughter had rejected all her values, was living in a way which appalled her. “And” she added, “what makes it worse is that I am a Marriage Guidance Counsellor.”
“Right” I replied, “and when people come to you with similar stories, I bet you tell them that it’s not their fault; that they mustn’t blame themselves.”
“Yes I do,” she said. “But it’s different when it’s your own.”
But it isn’t really. You can only do your best, co-operate with God’s grace, and leave the outcome to Him. You and I will never know, this side of eternity, what fruit we have borne, often in ways that we have never imagined. I remember another lady, who used to thank me profusely for some advice that I had allegedly given her about her son. From that day to this, I cannot recall ever giving her advice about her son. Yet something had clicked, without my ever knowing or intending it: perhaps she had misinterpreted something which I had said. No matter: God had done something in spite of me.
Oh, and one other thing. God will prune us, and at times that will hurt.
