Vine

The scriptures referred to are John 15:1-8.

In an episode of the Star Trek series Enterprise, the crew encounters an alien that for once doesn't look like a human with odd bumps on his forehead. Instead it looks rather like a web except that it grabs and wraps itself around anyone who gets close. The crew who are still free try to figure out how to fight the creature but hurting it hurts the crew members trapped by it. The doctor then tells them that the alien is not merely enveloping people but integrating them into the organism itself. When they finally figure out how to communicate with the creature, they discover it is only part of a much larger organism. It releases the humans it was incorporating into itself and the crew returns it to its home planet where the rest of it is awaiting reunion with it.

The first part of this episode, where people are being absorbed in the alien, is a nightmare. And the reason I bring it up is when we discuss Jesus' metaphor of the vine and the branches, those of us raised in the Western hemisphere with its emphasis on individualism often get uneasy. This is worse than being compared to sheep. Here we are reduced to plant life. Worse, we are compared to parts of a vine, a clinging, creeping thing.

Not so in ancient Israel, where viticulture was both familiar and important. In fact it was so important that a man who planted a vineyard was exempt from military service! (Deuteronomy 20:16) Vineyards were protected from thieves and hungry animals by stone walls and even watchtowers. There were laws concerning vineyards. They had to lie fallow every 7 years. (Leviticus 25:3-4) The owners couldn't pick all of the grapes at harvest time; some were to be left for the poor, like the fatherless, the widow and resident alien. (Leviticus 19:10; Deuteronomy 24:21) So central is the vine that the symbol of Israel's Ministry of Tourism is the giant bunch of grapes brought back by the spies Moses sent to check out the promised land. (Numbers 13:23)

The vine was often used by the prophets as a symbol of Israel. (Isaiah 5:1-7) But they lamented that the choice vine God had planted had become a wild vine yielding sour grapes. (Jeremiah 2:21) That's why Jesus calls himself the true vine. We, as the people of God, are his branches. We are the part that bears fruit. And the fruit is the whole point of the vine.

The reason the ancient peoples so valued vines was that the grapes could be eaten fresh and juicy. Or they could be dried to make raisins, a food that was not only portable but which lasted because they had no refrigeration. And of course, grapes could be made into wine. In a world where there were no other drinks than water, milk and beer, wine was treasured. And wine, taken in moderation, was seen as healthy. They didn't know about flavonoids but they did know wine had medicinal uses. It was the only painkiller and disinfectant around. Plus there were no ads telling them that drinking is cool. Wine was part of everyday life, used by all, abused by a few.

In order to produce good fruit, care must be taken. It is especially important to prune the vine of non-productive branches, so all of the nourishment is directed to the fruitful branches. The lopped-off branches are too thin and flexible to be used for building so they become cheap fuel and are burned.

This is the metaphor Jesus uses to picture our lives in him. We are not free agents, answering only to ourselves. We are connected to him. Our spiritual health, our fruitfulness is directly related to our being in him and him being in us. This language is mystical and hard to understand, so let's look at it through the lens of other things drawn from nature.

Inside each of us, in fact inside every cell in our body, is a lifeform. It has its own DNA, distinct from our own. These lifeforms are mitochondria. They regulate the life and the energy of our cells. Without them we would die. So you could say that we are environments for colonies of mitochondria; we are all worlds inhabited by them. But they are also dependent on us. They do not reproduce by themselves. They are passed on to us from our mothers. Men get their DNA from their mothers but do not pass them on to their children. They are passed instead from mother to daughter. And by taking samples of the mitochondrial DNA of ethnic groups from all over the world, scientists have discovered that we are all related. All of the human beings on earth are descended from the same woman, who lived in southern Africa 150,000 years ago. She is our mitochondrial Eve. (We also have a Y-chromosome Adam, who passed it on to all men.)

So not only are we inhabited by organisms, we are all part of one human family tree. We are all the same species, able to mate with each other, able to donate blood or organs to each other, and able to communicate with each other. We are part of each other.

Similarly, as Christians, we are part of the body of Christ and Jesus is in each of us and in all of us. We are part of him and he is part of us. We depend on him for spiritual nourishment and only through him do we bear fruit. But what is meant by fruit?

In the New Testament, fruit, in the spiritual sense, usually means the qualities that come from leading a godly life. Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit as love, joy, peace patience, generosity, faithfulness, humility and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23) Most of these need no explanation. But I have always been intrigued by the inclusion of self-control. If a person is filled with the Spirit, if they are totally God's, how can they be in control of themselves?

In some religions, the person looks forward to the oblivion of the self. In Hinduism and Buddhism, reincarnation is not looked on as a good thing. Instead one longs for the peace of Nirvana, literally the “blowing out” or extinguishing of the individual self and the absorption into the world soul, as a drop of water becomes an indistinguishable part of the ocean. In Christianity, we believe that being one with God doesn't mean ceasing to be yourself. The individual is not a mistake nor an illusion. Personality is not a bad thing. God made us to be ourselves but since we are created in the image of God, then, paradoxically, the more we are like God, the more we are ourselves. (1 John 3:2)

This paradox is found in the very nature of God. God is one but also three. There is one God but it is not an arithmetical oneness. It is the oneness of unity. God is literally love. (1 John 4:8) From the eternal love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father flows the Spirit of that love, a communal and yet distinct personality. In the Godhead there is no contradiction between personhood and total unity. And that is true of our union with God. (John 17:20-21) We do not lose who we are as we become part of him but we find ourselves enhanced even as we are changed. We are not like drops lost in the ocean but like pieces of a mosaic, each distinct but each part of a larger image of the God who is love.

So we are capable of self-control and thought even though we are in union with Jesus. Because our union is a matter of choice; it is not like being taken over by a space vine. God does not coerce us; he waits for our consent. He wants us to willingly join ourselves to him. By abiding in him and he in us, we will bear the fruit of his nature.

Dr. Warren Wiersbe has broken down the process into a series of interlocking steps: the secret of living the Christian life is fruit-bearing. The secret of fruit-bearing is abiding in Christ. The secret of abiding in Christ is obeying him.

Again we moderns bristle at the idea of obedience. But it is a part of life. We obey our parents, our teachers, our laws. Even those who divorce themselves from society must obey their instincts and their natures. We are not as free as we imagine ourselves to be.

If athletes wish to excel they put themselves under a coach, whom they obey in just about every aspect of their life: their diet, their sleep, their exercise, their attitude. Only through obedience to their coach can they achieve extraordinary feats of strength, speed and agility. If you wish to learn a skill or a field of knowledge, you put yourself under a teacher or a mentor. In each case we call it a learning a discipline. And Jesus calls us to be his disciples.

So the secret of abiding or remaining in Christ is obeying him. And the secret of obeying him is loving him. It's hard to obey someone whom you do not love and trust. We can obey Jesus because he loves us and cares for us and wants what is best for us, even though our idea of what is best for us is sometimes at odds with his. Only love allows us to surrender our idea of what is good for us to his.

The secret of loving him is knowing him. We love him because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19) We love him because we know what he has done for us and what he is doing in us: creating, redeeming and transforming us. And so we obey him in order that we might learn from him and grow into him.

The process is not easy. There is pruning. That which is not fruitful needs to be cut away. Again the athlete must focus his efforts and energy. That which diverts him from his goal or which detracts from it is eliminated.

Examples of this can be seen in the PBS series Frontier House. In it 3 families volunteered to live as their ancestors, homesteaders, did in 1883. But one family becomes obsessed with eating the amount of food they are used to. They go into debt at the general store to buy more food. They even cheat on the project by walking off the homestead to trade with modern neighbors for meat. Still the family misses protein—and sweets. The average person today eats 150 pounds of sugar a year. That's 3 times what he would have eaten 140 years ago. This had led to a situation in which our kids eat a lot but are malnourished. Fast food is supersizing our kids. With increased obesity comes greater incidence of diabetes, arthritis and asthma. In the richest country on earth we are killing our kids—and ourselves—with surplus and unhealthy food.

At one point the father, concerned that he has lost 30 pounds, sees a doctor. The doctor tells him he used to be overweight. Now he is lean and fit from all his work. His weight is that of a typical man of the 1880s. He is healthier for having given up or pruned away his sedentary, overfed modern life.

Often we confuse what we desire with what we need. That makes it hard for us to jettison extraneous things from our lives. I once saw a poster that said, “I can go without necessities; it's the luxuries I can't do without.” And on Frontier House the women of one family smuggle shampoo and makeup into what is supposed to be a historical recreation. But eventually the children find that they don't miss TV. They find purpose in taking care of the animals and digging and planting. As one boy observes later, in the 21^st century he has a lot and it means very little to him; in a recreated 1883, he had very little but it was all precious. The pruning of unnecessary stuff was good for him.

As science fiction author Robert Heinlein so inelegantly put it, 90% of everything is crap. Whether you agree with him on the percentage or not, it is true that much of what makes up our lives is unimportant. Fashion, entertainment, gossip, and various conveniences often crowd out what is important.

What's worse is that even that which is important can be confused with what is essential. At the end of the Frontier House experiment, historians and experts evaluated which of the 3 families could survive the winter. The essential things were how much food they had put up by canning for themselves, how much hay they had harvested to feed the animals, how much wood they had cut to burn and keep themselves from freezing, and how well they worked together as a team. One family is judged to not be able to to make it physically. Another is judged to have enough supplies but the visible growing strain between the husband and wife make it doubtful that they would be able to survive being cooped up in a one room cabin during the long Montana winter. (Small wonder the rate of domestic violence went up during the pandemic lockdown!) Only one of the 3 families was judged to have been able to make it. And that agrees with the statistics of people's survival at that time.

One father on Frontier House finds something essential. He finds the time to work with and teach his kids and thereby discovers what he was missing while doing his very important and well-paying executive job. And in the end what is essential for us is our relationship with God. Do we know him, love him, obey him, abide in him, and bear the fruit of his Spirit? Are we in him and is he in us? It's our choice. Because only in him do we find life. And only his love makes our lives worth living.