Fruit Connection

John 15:1-8

March 28, 2021 (Palm Sunday) • Mount Pleasant UMC

I’ve never been much of a gardener. My dad has always been good at it. When I was growing up, we had a big garden and we would spend many hours in late summer on the back patio snapping green beans and helping with other gardening chores. But I did not inherit his green thumb, though I’ve tried my hand at it. Two of our parsonages had a garden space and I felt like I should plant something there. So I’ve tried growing corn and peppers and cucumbers and pumpkins and green beans—none of which I could keep alive very well. About the only thing I was consistently successful at growing is tomatoes—which, of course, is God’s little joke on me because I don’t eat tomatoes though I do like making them into chili and spaghetti sauce.

But one of our parsonages had a grapevine. The pastor before me had planted it and she told me in another couple of years it would be producing grapes. So I watched it grow and I got so excited when little, tiny round grape-like things started to grow. I began to have visions of using the grapes to make jellies and jams and maybe even juice for communion at church. And I watched and I waited—and nothing. So I tore out the vine. Pulled every single vine out of the fence and cut it down to the ground. If it wasn’t going to produce, I wasn’t going to have it taking up space and making a mess. And then I left on a Holy Land trip. While I was gone, the vine began to grow back. In just a little over two weeks, that vine came back stronger than it had ever been. It taunted me. It promised much but never produced. For ten years, it was a living parable in our back yard, reminding me of Jesus’ claim to be “the vine.”

This morning, we’re continuing to look at the “I am” statements of Jesus found in the Gospel of John, and so far, we’ve looked at Jesus’ claim to be the bread of life, the light of the world, the good shepherd and the way, the truth and the life (he got a three-for-one with that statement!). This morning, we’re going to jump ahead just a bit chronologically as we look at the last of the “I am” statements John reports Jesus saying: “I am the vine” (Card, John: The Gospel of Wisdom, pg. 167). We’ll pick up the other ones on Thursday evening and next Sunday, but on this Palm Sunday, we’re going to move ahead a bit in the week as we join Jesus on his final walk with the disciples. On that walk, he shared one last image, one final illustration to help them understand him and what he was up to. Unlike the other sayings, this one was just for the disciples. It’s a last private moment before their world falls apart.

So in John 15, it’s late on Thursday evening. The disciples’ feet have been washed and the Last Supper is done. Now they are walking from the Upper Room, at one end of the Kidron Valley, to Gethsemane, at the other end of the valley. That would have been a twenty to twenty-five minute walk, and even today, it’s not easy. On one of our trips to Jerusalem, we asked our guide if some of us could walk it, and he told us no. It wasn’t safe, and it wasn’t easy—then or now. (But I still want to walk it one day.) On that Thursday night, they would have left the upper room sometime after 11:00 p.m., which means it would be rather dark except for the full moon that is present at Passover time (cf. Hamilton, Journey to the Cross, pg. 40; 24 Hours That Changed the World, pg. 31). I imagine they walked slowly, because Jesus knows he only has a short time to share some intimate, personal things with these men he loved so much. They were the ones who would carry on his mission. The conversation is a bit disjointed, which you would expect from a walk conversation, especially one in which Jesus is trying to share so much in such a short time. But as they leave the upper city, they head east and then north toward a grove of olive trees, a place they often went for prayer. And shortly after leaving the Upper Room, they would have passed by the south entrance of the Temple, over which was a huge sculpted vine. I think that, as they stood near or passed by that symbol, that’s when Jesus said to his followers, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener…I am the vine; you are the branches” (15:1, 5; Card 167; Hamilton 24 33; Tenney, “The Gospel of John,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 9, pg. 150).

Here’s maybe a new word for you: viticulture. That’s the practice of tending vineyards, and it’s something the disciples would have been familiar with (Tenney 150). Still today in parts of Israel and Palestine, you can see where the land has been terraced so a hilly property is turned into a series of flat spaces, like stair steps on the side of a hill. That allows vines to be grown and wine to be made (Wight, Manners and Customs of Bible Land, pg. 188). Grapes and winemaking were a huge part of the first century economy (NIDOTB, Vol. 1, pgs. 74-79). I kind of think that, out of all of Jesus’ “I am” statements, this one brought the most vivid images to the disciples’ minds. They knew what a vine looked like.

In fact, the vine had been a symbol of Israel for a long time, which is why there was this huge stone vine at the Temple entrance. Some even call the vine a “national symbol” of ancient Israel  (cf. Fuquay, The God We Can Know, pg. 73). In Psalm 80, the psalmist remembers Israel’s history as a vine, brought out of Egypt: “You transplanted a vine from Egypt,” he sings, “you drove out the nations and planted it. You cleared the ground for it, and it took root and filled the land” (80:8-9). Isaiah is even clearer. He writes this: “My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines” (5:1-2). A few verses down from that, he says this: “The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the nation of Israel, and the people of Judah are the vines he delighted in” (5:7). But Isaiah also says that the nation has not produced what God expected them to produce: “Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit…Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed; I will break down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated, and briers and thorns will grow there” (5:2, 5-6). Israel was God’s vine, but it produced “bad fruit.” In other words, God says, “Israel, you are not the people I had hoped you would become.” So again, as he has in other ways, Jesus is putting himself in the place of Israel. They were the vine, but now he is the vine.

And his father, the Gardener, is about to do two things in his vineyard:“cut” and “prune.” [SLIDE] Jesus puts it this way: “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful” (15:2). Those sound like the same thing, but to a vine grower, cutting and pruning are two different actions with different ends. A good vine grower (which I was not) will monitor the vine, keep a watch on it so he knows exactly how it’s growing. I usually looked at my vine once every two or three (or more) weeks, but a true gardener, one whose livelihood depends on the health of the vine, keeps constant watch on the vine because if it’s left untended, it will put all of its energy into growing more vine. And the more vine that grows, the more tangled the plant becomes so that the vines on the top end up stealing all the sunlight. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, without light, nothing lives. The branches at the bottom will wither and die (Wright, John for Everyone, Part Two, pg. 69) and while dead branches don’t require sap or energy from the vine, the vine’s strength is wasted holding up dead branches that are of no use to anyone (Fuquay 79). So, a good gardener comes along and cuts off the dead branches. They are gathered and burned, because dead grape branches were of no use to anyone in the first century. 

So Jesus is the vine, he says, and we are the branches. He sends life and health and strength out to the branches, sustains the branches. Without him, we can do nothing. But some branches need to be cut off, and that can be true of our individual lives and it can be true of our church life. If the church is the Body of Christ, if we are branches on the vine, then there can be, Jesus says, dead branches, life-sucking branches that the Father will cut off. Sometimes in your life or in the life of a church, those dead branches come in the form of people who are so self-centered they cannot see beyond their own lives. They fail to produce fruit; they spend all their energy on themselves. And it’s easy for us to get sucked into their lives. Sometimes we need to walk away from certain situations and not feel guilty about it. Sometimes, it’s simply not healthy to stay connected because they’re actually pulling us away from the life-giving vine. Every branch that does not bear fruit, that does not give life, is cut away.

Sometimes the dead branches that need to be cut off are things we’re holding onto in our past—things like regrets and resentments, anger and bitterness, envy and just generally living in the past and rehearsing old hurts. Those can become dead branches that weigh us down and take us away from the best God has for us. Have you known someone who is continually focused on their anger or their bitterness or what someone did to them years ago? It’s hard if not impossible for those folks to enjoy the life and the abundance Jesus the vine offers if they are insistent on clinging to dead branches. They would benefit from some time with Celebrate Recovery, learning the freedom that can come when the dead branches are cut away. No dead branch will ever lead us to the life that really is life, so the Gardener cuts.

And the Gardener prunes. The word there is very close to the word used for “clean” in verse 3 where Jesus tells the disciples, “You are already clean [or pure] because of the word I have spoken to you” (15:3). There’s a connection between being pruned and being clean or pure (Wright 70). Pruning is not for the dead wood; pruning takes place on the branches that are producing fruit. Good, healthy branches need pruning or else they will spend their energy producing more branches rather than doing what they were meant to do: creating grapes. Pruning is a trimming process, and it requires skill. It takes about three years for a professional pruner to be trained so they cut away just the right amount (Wiersbe, Jesus in the Present Tense, Apple Books edition, pg. 146). For the follower of Jesus, pruning means we submit to having our own goals and ambitions cut away. We surrender, and we do it under God’s terms. Richard Stearns, former president of World Vision, puts it this way: “God is not interested in negotiating our terms of surrender. He wants all of us” (Lead Like It Matters to God, pg. 34). And Stearns knows what he is talking about. When he was called to be the president of World Vision, he was the CEO of Lenox China, the company that makes china for the White House. He had just purchased his dream house and had five kids, and he was being asked to take a drastic reduction in income and move his family across the country. From most people’s perspective, it was “career suicide.” But the question that haunted him was this: “Are you willing to be open to God’s will for your life?” God wants us to be fruitful for the Master and so he will cut away those things in our lives that inhibit fruitfulness. It’s not easy; it can be very painful. Stearns says he did not go to World Vision willingly. “I was no Christian superhero…In the end, I did say yes, but mostly out of grudging obedience” (Stearns 47-49). He learned the truth of what Oswald Chambers said: “The greatest crisis we ever face is the surrender of our will” (qtd. in Stearns 33). Pruning is painful, but it’s essential.

Paul described it this way: “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10). As a young man, Paul was on the fast track to all sorts of success, and then Jesus knocked him off a horse, removed his eyesight for three days and exposed him to the power of the cross. In that, Paul became focused on one clear goal: to know Christ. One thing: to know Christ! Pruning helps us focus on and realize what is most important (cf. Tenney 151).

There have been many times God has had to cut things away in my life, not the least of which was the ways I had to learn dependence on him through several medical challenges. But do you know something I have discovered each and every time? It’s in those times, when I surrender my life to the pruning shears of the great Gardener, that I grow the most in my faith journey. And that makes sense, because it’s also at that time when the Gardener is closest to us. The gardener is never closer physically to the vine, nor is he ever more concerned about the health and well-being of the vine, than when he is pruning (cf. Wright 71). Though pruning in our lives may be difficult and it may hurt, God is with us every step of the way. He is closest to us during our most difficult times.

So, Jesus says the purpose of the branches is to bear “much fruit,” and when we bear fruit it proves we are his disciples (15:8). A bit earlier in the evening, Jesus had told these same men that the way the world would know they were his disciples is if they love one another (13:35). “A new command I give you,” he said as they sat at the table. “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (13:34), and then just a bit later, he told them, “If you love me, keep my commands” (14:15). So the fruit we are to bear, the life we are to live is connected to love—and not the mushy, Hallmark kind of love. This is agape—self-sacrificing love. The kind of love God has for us. The kind of love that is willing to lay down its life for the other person. He prunes us so we can love more, so we can bear much fruit. If we’re not growing in love, if we don’t love others more now than we did, say, a year ago, are we really allowing God to work in us, to prune us? Might we be in danger of being dead wood that is cut out?

In Galatians, Paul says anyone can see the evidence if God is not working in us—things like rage, selfish ambition, hatred, discord, envy and even worse things show up in our lives (Galatians 5:19-21). Those things, Paul says, are easy; anyone can do them. They are our “natural” state. But there is another way to live, Paul says. He calls it, in the tradition of Jesus, the “fruit of the spirit.” Maybe you remember the list: “The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance [or patience], kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (5:22-23). I don’t think Paul just happened to put “love” at the top of the list because it seems that all the rest of the fruit flows out of love. Without love, the rest of the fruit are impossible. Elsewhere, of course, Paul tells us that the greatest of all is love (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:3) because it is the most Christ-like. As we become more loving we become more like Jesus, the one who forgave even the people who were nailing him to the cross. God the Gardener prunes us so that we will become more like his son, but to be able to do that we have to stay connected to Jesus. We are the branches, he is the vine.

If we’re going to stay connected to Jesus, we have to first of all stay in the word. Jesus says pruning takes place through the word that is spoken to the disciples (15:3). For us, pruning takes place through the word that has been preserved for us in the Scriptures that we read and study. We need time each day to read and allow the words of the Bible to point us toward the Word of God, Jesus. I’m not saying it’s easy to find that time; you have to set it aside or it will never happen. For me, as I’ve shared before, that’s the first thing I do every morning. I have a place in our home where I go each morning that is my reading and prayer place. If I don’t keep that appointment every morning, my whole day is off and I feel disconnected. Some mornings the Scripture jumps off the page at me and other times I may not “hear” anything through my reading. That’s okay, because I know God is still using that word to shape and prune me even when I don’t know it or realize it. And I find that, as I read the Scriptures over and over year after year, God speaks to me in new and sometimes surprising ways even though I’ve read that psalm or that parable before.

And while personal study is vital, so is coming together with the body of Christ to read and study. My desire and goal that each and every person who is connected with Mount Pleasant would be a part of a small group that connects to the Scriptures and connects to each other. This last year has, of course, been more than a bump in the road in that goal, but I believe we’re going to get through this and get back on track. I know our LifeGroup plans to get back together after Easter, and others are starting to feel safe enough to gather again as well. Celebrate Recovery small groups have been meeting again, and our adult Sunday School classes are up and running, so there are places to connect. Being part of a community, a group that helps us grow, is essential to staying connected to the vine—at least in part because it’s only in community that we can really learn to love others, even those who irritate us, whom we don’t like, or who aren’t like us. Love grows, sometimes with difficulty but it grows nonetheless, in community.

There are other practices, disciplines that help us remain in Jesus as well. Prayer is the ongoing conversation we have with our Gardener, as he often directs our growth and shows us areas where we most need pruning. Baptism and communion are physical acts that demonstrate our desired connection with Jesus. In some respects, they are acts that announce our “branch” status, our connection to the vine and our desire to bear fruit. John Wesley listed several other practices, which he called “means of grace,” that can help us stay connected to the vine, things such as fasting (going without something for a time so that we can spend that time connecting with Jesus), attending worship, healthy living, sharing our faith with others, and Christian conferencing (or seeking the input of others in our decisions). All of those are good and helpful and important, but I want to suggest one more that I hadn’t thought of until I had a conversation with another pastor a while back. We were talking about the Lenten season and things that help us grow, and he mentioned how he finds it helpful to read biographies of great Christian saints—and not necessarily “saints” in the traditional, canonized sense, but people who have served God faithfully and well. As we talked, I realized that I have often found myself encouraged in my faith and better challenged to live a life of love when I read a story or a book like that. There’s something about hearing someone else’s story and the way Jesus has worked in their lives that spurs us on and calls us to greater faithfulness. Perhaps that’s a practice that would help you, not replacing Scripture reading but in addition to it. Scripture is always primary, and then God gives us other opportunities to grow the fruit that he longs to see in us.

And let’s never forget: everything we do is done for God’s glory and not our own. We give lip service to wanting God to receive the glory. We sing about it here at church, we may even talk about it in small groups, but then we tend to spend most of the week trying to get glory and notice and recognition for ourselves. Jesus reminds us that we are branches, connected to the vine, and any fruit we grow, any results we bear are only because of what we receive from the vine—from him. He gives us life. He gives us strength. He gives us whatever abilities we have. He helps us love those who are difficult to love. And he prunes us to make us better, stronger, more loving. For all of those reasons, we pray along with the psalmist, “Not to us, Lord, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness” (Psalm 115:1). We live for the sake of God’s glory.

Jesus said, “I am the vine; you are the branches…apart from me you can do nothing” (15:5). But with him and in him, all things are possible…even loving one another. Thanks be to God. Let’s pray.