"I am the Vine, you are the branches." Jn. 15.1
Jesus starts out today's Gospel (Jn. 15.1-8) with a lesson in viticulture. It seems pretty obvious. For a branch of a grapevine to bear grapes it has to be connected to the main stem. Our Lord extends this metaphor to Himself and His disciples. If they are to be effective in their efforts, that is to preach and model the Good News of the Kingdom of God, they need to abide in Him or their efforts will wither and die. There is also the implication (a pretty clear one) that they too would wither and die.
Abide in Him?
Whatever does that mean?
Yesterday two of my brothers and I directed a quiet day for the Diocese on Loving God, looking at the witness of Ss. Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena. We focused first on the great commandment in Matthew 22.37: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." Looking then at the witness of these two saints, two separate branches off the Vine, they showed two very different yet very similar approaches. St. Catherine was a doer, St. Thomas was a thinker, but they both talked constantly with Jesus (with the whole Trinity, actually), and thought nothing of brining even the smallest matter to Him, and then they shared those insights with anyone who would listen. They modeled their behaviour off those conversations with God. They made it their focus, and so made the world around them a better place because the Kingdom of God was there.
It's all relationship. To abide in the Vine is to have a relationship with Our Lord. If it is a good relationship, where we listen, then our very behaviours start to change. We learn to love God, and in so doing we learn to love what God loves, and that is spreading the Hope of the Gospel around, not just preaching liberation and deliverance but helping bring it about. We battle ignorance, poverty, oppression, alienation, and hatred because those things are not of God, but clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, releasing the captive, restoring hope to the hopeless, caring for the sick, all those things please God, and in loving Him we love all those He loves.
Abide in the Vine...a relationship in this life with Jesus in Whom we see the Father, a relationship that lasts for eternity.
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