Acts 8.26-40: Philip meets a wealthy Ethiopian on the road and interprets the Scriptures for him; the Ethiopian is baptised.
1 John 4.7-21: God is shown in our love, and we know this because of the Holy Spirit1.
John 15.1-8: Jesus is the vine, we are the branches, and branches not bearing fruit are cut off and thrown away.
Just love one another, John tells his community in this week’s epistle. Love comes from the Father, and if we love one another, then God lives in us. We know this because of the Holy Spirit. Simple, right?
Of course it’s simple. God loves us, we love others, God is found in our love. The whole is underpinned by the sending of the Son, by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Our response to the gift of God’s love is to love in return. Again, simple. But it seems to get a bit more complicated when we get to the Gospel.
Jesus is the vine, we are the branches – we have our being in this love that John talks about, grounded and kept alive by the love of God, by the vine Jesus. Branches nourished by the vine bear fruit to the Father’s glory. But it’s a different story for the branches not bearing fruit – they are cut off and thrown away. Wait, what? How can this be so, when John tells us that perfect love casts out fear? It’s quite sensible to be fearful of being cut off from the vine – cut away from our source, severed from any chance of re-nourishment2. It does seem overly harsh. Poor dry branches.
If there’s one thing we know about Jesus, though, it’s that he never punished, never rejected3 – it’s punishment and rejection which Jesus himself ends up facing. Jesus is all about inclusion and healing – so why would he not want to heal and dry and fruitless branches? Surely there isn’t any part of creation beyond the healing and restoring love of the Creator?
We all have the experience of bearing fruit, of feeling close to God, of richness in prayer and strength in faith. And we all have the experience of the opposite, too. We all know what it is like to be dry and unnourished, to feel that our connection to our Source is somehow weakened, even severed. We know what it’s like to try and to hope and to pray and to not bear fruit. And we all know what it is to be weighed down, burdened with things which keep us from God.
It is this which will be pruned away and discarded. Not us as people, but a stripping back of all that keeps us from health, from fruitfulness, from God. We all have good branches, and we can never be truly severed from the vine – despite how far from the heart of the vine we might feel ourselves. Stripping away the deadwood from our inner lives enriches us, freeing us to love and to be loved, to find ourselves in the vine through the Holy Spirit.
It is this love, embedded in and growing out of the Holy Spirit, which enables Philip to reach out in love to the Ethiopian he sees struggling with the Scriptures. It is the Holy Spirit which enables Philip to change the man’s life; it is the Holy Spirit which nurtures and enables us.
We do not always feel nourished and enabled. But even when it seems that there are more dead branches than living ones in our own lives, in the life of our community, we are asked to trust. We are asked to trust that we are the branches, connected to our Source, that we will never be cut away. We are asked to trust that we will always bear fruit, will always dwell in the love that grounds and sustains us.
And then we are asked to do something about it. John’s advice: just love. God, it turns out, will do the rest. Simple.
* Spoiler: everything will be ok.
1 Who presumably also had quite a bit to do with Philip’s conversation with the Ethiopian. And every other interaction between God and creation, really.
2 Or is that not actually how it works? Please just pretend for the sake of the metaphor that being attached to the vine would save the branch. Thank you.
3 Although, maybe the Pharisees he publicly humiliated would disagree – but given that they were trying to outsmart Jesus and score their ego-based points, they probably don’t get a vote on this matter.
Photo by Rohit Tandon on Unsplash
Christ Church Cathedral Choir 