Meeting Jesus - Week Four: John 15:1-8
I often wish that I was a better gardener.
It’s something that I enjoy doing when I do it, but I don’t get around to it often enough to be proficient at it.
My general style of gardening is to let things go for a little too long and then spend a good day in the hot sun bashing, chopping, and slashing whilst muttering under my breath.
I know that many of you are much better gardeners, and you will have a better natural sense for the gardening metaphors of the Bible just naturally by your time spent planting, weeding, and pruning.
Have you ever noticed just how many of the metaphors that Jesus uses to talk about life with God are gardening metaphors?
The Bible is full of agricultural metaphors that speak of what it means to be in relationship with God.
Today’s passage from John is a great example.
Jesus speaks of a vine, a vinedresser, and branches.
He is the vine, God is the vinedresser, and we are the branches.
So, we’re going to unpack this passage together this morning, but before we do. Let’s take a moment to ground John 15 in the wider story of the Bible.
There is a lot about gardens in the Bible, and particularly about vineyards.
John 15 in the context of Scripture….
This image of the vine is an image that is strongly embedded in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Psalm 80 speaking of the people of Israel says: “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it. You cleared the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land”
Israel is referred to as the vine here in Psalm 80, and in the prophets, Israel is referred to as God’s vineyard. Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Isaiah all use the image. (Jer 12, Ezek 15, Ho. 10, Isa. 5).
Isaiah 5:
Let me sing for my beloved
my love song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
2 He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
and he looked for it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.
3 And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem
and men of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.
4 What more was there to do for my vineyard,
that I have not done in it?
When I looked for it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?
5 And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
6 I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and briers and thorns shall grow up;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.
7 For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold, bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold, an outcry!
Isaiah laments the lack of good fruit produced by Israel.
What the prophets criticize so often is the failure of the vineyard of Israel to produce good fruit. This is what the vine exists for, to produce fruit. The vine exists to grow and to flourish.
Yet the vine was not flourishing, it was languishing.
The vine was struggling to produce any kind of good fruit.
So, what does the Vinedresser do? What does God do?
Initially he brings judgement upon the vine. The people of Israel experience exile. At the same time, God has a rescue plan to set things right.
God plants a vine called Jesus – the one true vine, the one true Israelite who establishes his kingdom which will bear fruit of love and justice and peace and hope.
Bearing fruit…
Notice that in John 15, the fruit is also the focus of the passage.
The fruit is clearly important.
So, what is the fruit about?
Firstly – I think the fruit refers to our common calling in creation.
Like I said, I am not a gardener, but I do know that when someone plants a vine, they hope for grapes.
If we plant a lemon tree in our garden, we do so hoping for lemons.
This is the logical hope for a tree that bears fruit.
It’s rather unnatural for a vine or fruit tree to be barren.
So, as I read this passage, I see the fruit representing the natural flow of what it means to be human.
To be fruit is to be who God created us to be. It is to be who we are.
The Biblical story tells us that God created humanity to be in relationship with Him, and with each other. To steward and tend to the earth, to be creative and to be God’s image bearers in the world.
The Scriptures have a word for this – shalom.
To speak of shalom is to speak of the world being as it should be. It is to speak of peace and goodness, well-being, and life flourishing.
So, to bear fruit, on one hand is to live the life we have all been called to live as God’s creatures.
In Galatians, Paul speaks of the fruit of the Spirit which show us the character of a life fully alive - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control
Secondly, the fruit speaks of our calling in Christ.
The prophets criticize Israel for not being who they were called to be.
They were planted as a vineyard, set apart to bear witness to God’s love in the world, and be a reminder to the nations about our common calling as God’s creatures.
Yet they consistently missed the point, got it wrong, made it about themselves or forgot their mission.
Yet God in his faithfulness, kept on gracefully calling them back and reminding them of their mission.
Jesus comes to his people and reminds them once again who they are called to be -they are to be salt and light – to bear witness to God.
Jesus comes to restore fruitfulness. To restore us to our full humanity –to bring us home to who we truly are.
But as the prophets point out, this fruit bearing business is not all that simple. The fruit doesn’t come so easily. Fruit such as loving our neighbours, doing justice, showing kindness, and caring for this beautiful place we have been created to steward. Fruit such as following Jesus and being the people, he has called us to be in his teachings.
What is the key issue?
Why can bearing fruit be so difficult.
Well – to put it simply -it’s hard to bear any fruit when you are not connected to the tree.
The fruit we are called to bear comes from the source of life itself – from Jesus, the Word who was at the beginning.
Jesus is the vine from which branches will grow and bear fruit.
That is why Jesus goes on to speak of two major aspects of this vineyard business.
He talks of abiding and pruning.
Abiding –
Abiding is about being connected to the source of life and human flourishing – Jesus.
This metaphor of the vine and the branches makes me think of my favourite psalm – Psalm 1.
“Blessed is the one
who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
or sit in the company of mockers,
2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
and who meditates on his law day and night.
3 That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.
4 Not so the wicked!
They are like chaff
that the wind blows away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
6 For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked leads to destruction.”
This Psalm speaks of life with God being like planted next to a source of water which nourishes and sustains so that we might bear fruit, so that our lives might flourish.
Paul also used language of being grounded and connected to God.
He implores the church in Colossians saying:
“As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” (Colossians 2:7)
The idea present in Psalm 1, and here in Colossians, and in John 15 is that the kind of fruit that really matters won’t come through our own efforts. We can’t squeeze out shalom via our own wishes or actions. Rather, fruitfulness will come, and life will come when we spend time connected to the source of our life – to God in Christ Jesus.
So how do we abide?
An image that I found helpful to think about when it comes to bearing spiritual fruit is the image of the vine and trellis.
I remember my dad growing peas in the garden on a trellis. The wild vines twisting around the wooden frame.
A vine is an organic, vibrant, growing thing. We can’t manipulate the growth that God wants to do in us, we can’t force out spiritual fruit such as love, joy, peace, patience etc.
There is a wildness to the image of the vine.
The trellis on the other hand is a man-made thing. It is something we put in place to aid the growth of a vine, as a prop for it to cling onto and a guide for growth.
Learning to abide is like crafting a trellis which allows for good growth to happen. It’s a way of us participating in God’s grace and making choices to form habits that say yes to what God wants to do in our lives.
Our trellis will be made up of various practices that create space for us to grow in God.
There are two aspects I want to highlight today.
1) Our abiding together.
We, together are the vine, made up of various branches. Together we are connected to Christ. And so, to abide it is important that we gather to worship. It is important that we read and study Scripture together, that we pray together, that we share in communion, and that we go out to love and serve our community together. We are a community, a church, and we are not called to be individual saplings, doing Christianity alone, but rather a vine, branches interconnected and held together.
2) Second, we must also learn to abide privately.
When Jesus taught us to pray, he taught us to go quietly to our own room, behind closed doors and to pray to our Father in Heaven who hears us. Each of us, are called to abide in our day to day lives – finding regular time to be with Jesus.
The invitation that I hope you hear loud and clear in all of this is the invitation to be in an intimate and close relationship with Jesus.
Pruning – For growth we need to go through pruning.
There are also words of challenge in John 15. We hear of the consequences of not abiding and bearing fruit.
Without God our life will withers. There are words of judgement here for those who reject God, the source of our life and flourishing.
And for those who abide, and remain connected to the vine, fruitfulness will require pruning.
This is the painful process of Jesus producing true spiritual growth in our lives. These pruning moments are where God makes us aware of that which hinders our walk with him. The sin in our lives, the character flaws, the stuff that God wants to work on. Pruning is a painful but loving act of the Father who tends the vine.
I like the way Tom Wright puts it saying:
“And, though it always hurts, we must be ready for the father’s pruning knife. God is glorified, and so will we be, by bearing good quality fruit, and lots of it. For that to happen, there will be extra growth that needs cutting away. That, too, is an intimate process. The vine-dresser is never closer to the vine, taking more thought over its long-term health and productivity, than when he has the knife in his hand.”[1]
In the same way that vines produce fruit in one season, and then are pruned so that they may grow more fruit, we too go through a process of constant growth in our lives as we follow Jesus.
Just this week I was talking to a parishioner here, who has been part of St John’s for 48 years and following Jesus for a long time. They made it very clear to me that they are still growing and God is still pruning and shaping their lives.
So as we meet Jesus in this passage this morning, we discover that he is the true vine – that he expresses the flourishing and fruitful life. He is the one true human in that sense.
We are invited to be connected to Him, to be sustained and nourished by relationship with Him and to find that when we abide in him we find ourselves most fully alive.
-preached by Joshua
[1] Tom Wright, John for Everyone.