The Vine We Could Not Be

A grapevine is a strange plant to build a religion of hope around. Its wood is too soft and crooked to frame a house. It earns its place by one work only; take away the fruit and it is a weed.

On the night before he died, in a borrowed upstairs room, Jesus of Nazareth reached for that exact plant. "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser" (John 15:1). The word carrying the weight is true.

The vine was already taken. "I planted you a choice vine," God said through Jeremiah, "how then have you turned degenerate and become a wild vine?" (Jeremiah 2:21). The prophets took it up to mourn; Isaiah sang of a day when that same vineyard would fill the world with fruit (Isaiah 27:6). True here is alēthinos, the archetype: the vine Israel could not be, and which God swore he would yet make her — I am.

Then he turns to us, the branches. Everything green in a branch arrived from somewhere else. "Apart from me you can do nothing," he says (John 15:5). Not little. Nothing.

We hear that as a threat, because we have been living off fruit we can point to — the kindness, the steadiness. What we fear in that "nothing" is not uselessness but unlovedness. Before any fruit, he says, "Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you" (John 15:3) — an identity received from the Vine, never achieved on the branch.

Then the knife. "Every branch that does bear fruit he prunes" (John 15:2). It falls on the fruitful branch, not the barren one, and the hand holding it holds us up. That is his care, not his verdict. He cuts where there is life, because he intends more; nothing he takes is wasted.

Let the warning be a warning. The branch that does not abide is "thrown into the fire, and burned" (John 15:6) — wood tied on and never grafted in, like Judas, who had just gone out into the night. Paul names who went into that curse instead: Christ became a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). A grape gives its wine only by being crushed; there was a cup on that table, his fruit before he asked us for ours.

So "abide in me" (John 15:4) is the gentlest command in the Gospels, and it is still a command. He says what it means: "If you abide in me, and my words abide in you" (John 15:7); "if you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love" (John 15:10). Not straining to grow what only a root can grow — staying where his word is spoken and his love is given. Which is something we do, and can leave off doing — remaining where we are already held, receiving what we never made. The worthless wood is what holds us up.