Remaining in the Vine: Love, and Bearing Fruit

Easter 5 2024; John 15:1-8

The Easter season Gospel readings focus first on the appearance of Jesus after the resurrection, and now on the ongoing presence of Jesus among the believers. Yet these readings are set not after the first Easter, but before it. The readings from John’s Gospel on the fifth and sixth Sundays of Easter each year come from across chapters 13-15, the extended discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper (the whole meal scene actually lasts five chapters, 13-17). Characteristic of the Fourth Gospel, the setting of Jesus’ speech shifts between the meal shared with friends before his Passion, and the present post-Easter world of the reader, who is also a disciple.

Some interrelated themes recur across chapters 14-15: Jesus’ departure is not what it seems, because he will be present (14:1-7; 15:4f); he will send the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, as the means of this presence (14:15-17, 26, 15:26); the presence of Jesus and the Advocate is also that of the Father (14:8-13, 23, 15:9-10); and the sign of all this is the love that the disciples will show for one another (14:15, 21-24; 15:17). Although not all these pieces occur in today’s Gospel, they are the context, and the vine image relies on them and illustrates them all.

The idea and language of presence as “dwelling” or “abiding” is used in the NSRV through these chapters, yet we may struggle because neither “abiding” nor “dwelling” is used very much in modern English. In the original Greek they are however versions of the same word. In chapter 14 (which is read in Year A) Jesus famously speaks of there being many “dwelling-places” (“mansions” in the KJV, as some will remember) “in my Father’s house.” “Dwelling-places” uses the same language translated “abiding” in chapter 15. This first parable (as might well think of it) sets the scene for the vine parable today.¹

“House of the Lord”—for Jesus “my Father’s House”—is not really an image of heaven, but an image of the Church. It is the most common way of referring to the Temple in the Old Testament, as Mary Coloe points out.² Of course this not about buildings, but about life in God, present and future (including a future beyond the life we see), now focussed in Jesus himself, who is a new temple or dwelling of God—a notion John had introduced early in the Gospel (2:21). So this is a call or invitation for disciples to dwell or abide in him now, although there is actually more emphasis on God’s (or the Advocate’s) dwelling or abiding in us, than the reverse. This parable nevertheless helps elucidate the vine image today that follows.

The parable of the vine emphasizes and urges the disciples’ own “abiding.” In both parables, Jesus is the focus of the image, and his teaching in both chapters presents discipleship not as adherence to ideas but as practice characterized by three things in one: observance of the command to love, the presence of the Advocate, and the somewhat mysterious “abiding” itself.

The vine here is not primarily to be read as a eucharistic image, mostly obviously perhaps because this is not actually about drinking. Bread and wine are eucharistic foods, but staple foods first (the passage, by the way, does not mention a “vine-grower” as such, but simply a farmer or gardener, who might be assumed to care for various crops or trees).

The “Great Chalice of Antioch” (in fact a lamp); Metropolitan Museum, New York. Photo Fr Lawtence OP

While communities of disciples might of course have made a connection with the vine metaphor when drinking eucharistically, the key to the image is the significance of vine-growing as part of the world of work and production, and the lesson drawn about “remaining.” While just as for the bread of John 6 (which we read at length in July and August) there is a possible connection with the meals of the Christian community where Jesus is understood to be present, more fundamental is the connection with everyday life and in this case the command to love.

In the NRSV the word “abide” occurs eight times in this Gospel passage (it also appears six times in the Epistle, from 1 John). As noted already though, this is the same word translated as “dwell” in ch. 14; we could translate it that way here too, except that the vine metaphor demands something a little different. “Remain” might work; if this were used across the two chapters, we would then read that the Spirit “remains” with us (14:16, 17), Jesus “remains” in the Father, and then that the branches must also “remain” in Christ the vine.³

Even Jesus’ teaching to “remain” however may seem to imply that branches can choose. Jesus actually says something quite different; the alternative to remaining is not some sort of curious self-pruning mechanism, but the more sobering prospect of the Father’s removal of the branches should they fail to bear fruit.

Who then is being given a choice, and what is it? Some modern commentators have tended to take this imagery—and the implication that some do not remain/dwell/abide— to refer to divisions within the Christian community.⁴ This is possible, but the state of the Johannine community is unknown to us. What is clear is how John defines what it means to abide/remain/dwell, and how separation from the vine takes place.

As José Porfirio Miranda points out, the passage is not so much an explanation of why some people have left, but a challenge or invitation to the Christian addressees themselves to love, and hence not to be cut off. “John is not addressing apostates but Christians.”⁵ The warning about the Father’s pruning activity is not an idea we can apply to others who have separated themselves but a message to every reader that no amount of piety or theology—or visible unity—is a substitute for love. Without love we are not part of the vine at all.

The vine is an image of the community after Jesus’ glorification (cross, resurrection) and hence after what otherwise appears to be a departure. It is therefore an Easter story, but about us. Just as in John 14 and the parable of the Father’s House we hear Jesus assure the reader that his apparent absence is followed by the Advocate’s presence, so too the vine is an image of this community of love in which Jesus may not be visible except as the whole entity, the whole plant, which “abiding” as his risen body in the world bears the fruit of love.

1. Ruben Zimmermann, “Are There Parables in John? It Is Time to Revisit the Question.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 9, no. 2–3 (January 1, 2011): 243–76.

2. Mary L. Coloe, God Dwells with Us : Temple Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel. Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 2001, p.160 n.5.

3. In this instance at least NIV, NASB and some others do the job better.

4. Barrett, The Gospel of John sspeaks of “apostate Christians” (p. 473). See also Raymond Brown’s The Community of the Beloved Disciple.

5. José Porfirio Miranda, Being and the Messiah: The Message of St. John. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1977, p. 167.