Download HOMILY for the 27th Sunday of Ordinary Time, October 8th

HOMILY for the 5th SUNDAY of EASTERTIDE [B], May 6th., 2012
“I am the true Vine”
The Vine. As we have had fairy stories the last two weeks, I had better say straightaway that this sermon
contains absolutely no mention of Jack and the Beanstalk.
Some of Jesus’ much-loved images must mean rather less in different cultures. “I am the Bread of Life”
must have less impact, surely, in rice-eating lands. And not everywhere grows vines. In northern lands,
before the days of mass travel, most people had never seen them. Jesus should say “I am the potato patch”
or “I am the beetroot field”, to say nothing of the broccoli and the Brussels sprouts.
One priest, in fact,
asked his flock to come up with alternative images, and somebody proposed: “I am the electricity, and you
are the bulbs”, which is hardly very poetic or appealing especially given the extraordinary shapes of light bulbs
nowadays.
The vine, like the shepherd, is an image which the original listeners would have known very well from the
Scriptures, that is, from the Old Testament. Over and over again, the Chosen People are described as a vine
planted by God, but one which produces sour grapes because of their infidelity. Jesus, too, tells the parable
of the vineyard let out to tenants to produce a crop, but the tenants prove to be vicious, and murderers, too.
But here it is different. The vine is not something made and cared for by God. The vine is God. “I am
the Vine.” We are the branches, and so we are the vine which is Jesus himself. Before “going away” – in
the original context before his Passion, in the liturgical context of this Sunday before his Ascension – Jesus
creates this image of a relationship of intimacy with himself.
So Jesus is the totality of the people of God; Jesus is the totality of God inserted into his people.
Father, the vine owner, is the source; the Son is the vine, incarnate; the fruit is the Holy Spirit.
The
This image of the vine and the branches is very similar to Paul’s image of the body and the head; the limbs
and the head together form one body. Christ is not just part of the Church with ourselves as another,
subordinate, part.
To an age which knew little of wine-science (or oenology, if you prefer), the vine was very mysterious;
indeed, it still is. It produces grapes which produce wine, but the personality of the wine from the same
vines differs each year; the vines respond unpredictably to care, and indeed sometimes do best when
receiving little care, or at least little fertiliser.
The end of the story is not so much quantity or mass
production as personality. And the vines take light, to produce the juice which delights our heart. “I am
the Light of the World.” We can see what an excellent image the vine is for us fickle humans, therefore,
fickle but still bonded to God.
The whole art of being a person lies in relationships. Unfortunately our lives have many relationship
difficulties. We find it hard to face “the other”, to accept all of “the other”. People who would be good
Christians can fall down over the matter of “the other”. That is why the First Reading is so appropriate this
weekend: the apostles struggle to admit the outsider, the former persecutor, Paul to their ranks. But wine
suggests generosity, gift, conviviality. Drinking alone is supposed to be bad for you (I hope this is shown to
be scientifically false as far as my night-time noggin is concerned).
And funnily enough, in an age which
seems to love genealogical research (and isn’t the family tree rather like the vine?) we are actually more
separated from each other than ever.
This will not do for eternal life. “The saints are those who have
broken the walls which separate each life from all the others.”
We can look at belonging to the vine in more than one way. Jesus could be saying: “Attach yourself to me,
and you will live”. That could be seen as rather utilitarian: “Get involved!” A more vital way is to see it
as a relationship, where God is intimately concerned too. It is as though Jesus says: “I am not truly the
vine if you are not grafted onto me. The more you are the branches, the more I am the vine”.
And here is where the idea of the Church comes in. The vine, if you like, is the Church. Some 200 years
ago a leading Protestant thinker – if you like names, he was Friedrich Schleiermacher, died 1834, but I won’t
test you on that – pointed out a radical difference between Protestantism and Catholicism. In Protestantism
the order is: Jesus Christ, the Believer, the Church. If you believe, you join the Church. In Catholicism
the order is: Jesus Christ, the Church, the Believer. You come to the Church, and so you believe. This is
less individualist, but it involves a big responsibility for all the members of the Church. We can’t just be
sitting admiring the beautiful vine, defending our own interests; we have to understand ourselves as being the
vine, being the visible image of Christ for the world.
Jesus Christ and the Church are all one. It was Joan of Arc who said that at her trial in Rouen, and it must
have required courage to say it, because it certainly didn’t look like it, while she was being assailed by her
principal opponent Monseigneur Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais, who was hardly a visible icon of the Holy
Trinity. But it’s still true. The shining light of God’s grace and salvation can only come for the world
through the Church, the Vine. You can’t have Christ without the Church.
And vice versa, of course. “Without me you can do nothing.” Not like our friend Pelagius with his famous
heresy – “work like mad for your own salvation”, nor the opposite – “sit on your backside and leave it all to
God”. We are to respond to Christ’s love with a love as free as his. This is the sap which courses through
the vine.
Of course the cultivator wants the product of the vine to be good. God wants our holiness. Holiness is “a
current of divine life passing through the heart of the world”. But the cultivator doesn’t expect a perfect
vine; that is asking too much. Anyway, perfection has been described as the “spoilt little sister of death”.
No; the Church is for saints and sinners; the wine of the Lord is to be shared with the world, even if some
do not accept it very gratefully.
And lastly the vine needs pruning. That sounds painful. And indeed we all know that pain, in one form or
another, is a part of our life. But based on what Jesus has been saying, we can see that our sufferings on
earth are just the first manifestation of the true life of Christ in us. that we belong, and that we truly are not
just part of the vine, but we are the Vine, just as he is the Vine. We with him, and he with us, and all of us in
the Father.