5th Sunday of Easter

          “I am the vine, you are the branches.”  If we are careful students at all of our Lord, we know that He often uses these kind of earthy, agrarian images to get His point across – whether He’s talking about sheep and shepherds (as we heard last week), sowers and seeds, vineyards, fig trees, mustard seeds, harvesting wheat, or about a vine and branches.  Sadly, these are images that might not “translate” quite as well to us as they did to Jesus’ original audience, many of whom would have understood these images readily from their daily lives.  I have managed to keep a few plants alive at my house and in my office, and the past couple of summers have had a small garden, but that’s about the extent of my agricultural “know how.”  Unless perhaps you grew up on a farm, we have lost something of our access to these images in our modern, very technology-driven world.   

          And yet, I think these images still speak to us powerfully.  This particular image of the vine and the branches is especially powerful, as it evokes a sense of intimacy and life.  There is something truly “vital” – that is, pertaining to life itself – about this image.  We know (even without knowing much about plants) that if you cut something off of plant, a branch from a vine or a stock, that clipping will not by itself continue to live, much less thrive.  And this is how Jesus wishes to express our relationship to him.  This is how close He desires us to be if we would have life and to have it abundantly.

          How do we (to use another agricultural term) go about “cultivating” this intimate, life-giving relationship with Christ the Vine?  I would suggest three very basic things: prayer, penance, and community.

          First, prayer.  I remember attending one of the many youth conferences I have gone to over the years in which one of the speakers said something very striking.  He said, “Prayer is not something you do to improve your relationship with God.  Prayer is your relationship with God.”  Now certainly, I don’t think he meant to reduce the expression of our Christian life to just prayer.  As we know, a big part of our relationship with God is doing as John instructs us today in his first letter: “Let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.”  Part of loving God is also loving all whom God loves, loving our neighbor and putting our faith into action.  Still, we can’t very well claim to have a relationship with God if we do not talk with God.  And what is prayer but talking with God?  Our speech and our actions should, in some sense, be the fruit of our prayer, the fruit of our relationship with God, like the fruit or the flower of a plant.  And so, prayer is truly vital, life-giving, life-sustaining.

          And what greater prayer do we possess as a Church than the one we are offering right now, the Mass?  Here we are nourished from the Vine, in both word and sacrament.  Allow me to give you an architectural image of this.

          The chapel where I went to major seminary after graduating from St. Ambrose had a green marble floor that extended down the steps of the sanctuary, down the main aisle and branched out along the way in the nave (or main body) of the chapel.  It created a nice effect architecturally, but more than this, it made the point that our life as seminarians and as Christians, flowed from the Eucharist.  It said in stone, in effect: “Jesus is the vine, you are the branches.” 

          And so, prayer, most especially coming together to pray as we are today, is so important – indispensable, in fact – in cultivating a healthy, nourishing, life-giving relationship between “the vine and the branches.”

          A second thing that will help greatly in this is penance, and I mean this is the broadest sense.  Certainly, this includes the Sacrament of Penance, or what we more typically call today the “Sacrament of Reconciliation,” but not just that.  There is, of course, something truly restorative and life-giving in acknowledging our sins, and confessing them honestly and openly to a priest.  I say this not only as one who hears confessions, but also as someone who goes to the Sacrament with some regularity.  To me, this is like that “pruning” that Jesus is talking about, cutting away the dead stuff, or the stuff that is unhealthy or sucking energy from this “plant” that is our relationship with God. 

As I mentioned, my agricultural background is very limited, but I have picked up a few things along the way.  I know, for example, that tomato plants will get little branches that want to grow in between the stalk and the main branches.  They won’t produce any tomatoes, but they will redirect energy from the main plant that could be used to produce tomatoes, and so you have to pluck or clip them off.  This pruning process doesn’t ultimately hurt the plant, but in fact helps it.  Just as Jesus says: “He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and every one that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit.”

Apart from the Sacrament of Penance or Reconciliation, even a daily examination of conscience can be a valuable tool in this “pruning process,” looking back at the day to take stock of where we bore fruit and where we didn’t, when we were close to “the vine” and when we weren’t.  I would add to this some modest and appropriate self-denial: trying to live more simply, not to give ourselves whatever we want, whenever we want it, in whatever quantity we want it, but “clipping away” the non-essentials, and making small, quiet sacrifices to both strengthen the will and open ourselves more fully to the grace of God.  All of this falls under that broader category of “penance” and is helpful, if not essential, for healthy “plant life.”

Lastly, I would recommend community as a way of sustaining and strengthening this relationship between “the vine and the branches.”  We see a beautiful example of this in our first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles.  Saul, who as we know, had been a fierce persecutor of the “followers of the way,” has now had his eyes opened and has come to faith in this same Jesus, whose followers he had up until recently hunted down.  You can imagine why the community of believers was a little nervous, a little skeptical and a little hesitant to bring him into the fold.  But, as it says, “Barnabas took charge of him and brought him to the apostles.”  Barnabas is truly a man of communion, who is not afraid (to use a favorite term of our Pope) “to go to the margins.”  And so, he reaches out to Saul and accompanies him and brings him to the community.

Maintaining the vine is not just about maintaining our own personal and individual relationships with Jesus.  It is about looking after and growing the “whole plant,” so to speak.  It is a collective, communal affair.  In the case of Barnabas and Saul, it is even “grafting on” this new branch, who will become Paul, and who will go on to bear much fruit through his letters and missions, especially among the gentiles.  If we are going to be healthy and bear fruit, it is again vital, that we grow in communion and that we reach out to others.

Last night, I was able to witness something of this in Iowa City.  The students at the Newman Center there organized an event call “Night Fever” at St. Mary’s Church in downtown Iowa City.  This is something that actually grew out of World Youth Day 2005 in Cologne, Germany.  Basically, they had the main doors of the church flung open, the church beautifully decorated, kept dark, but with a lot of candles throughout the church.  Throughout the evening, from about 6:30 until 10:30, they had Eucharistic adoration and beautiful music that ranged from more traditional hymns to more contemporary “praise and worship” style music provided by a very talented bunch of students.  And they had priests available (of which I was one) for people to talk with or to go to confession.  But then – and this is the really neat part of it all – the students were out front of the church and on the corners, and venturing further into the downtown area politely, but enthusiastically inviting people to stop in for a prayer, to light candle, to talk to one of the priests or just to take a few moments in quiet reflection, to simply “remain” a while with Jesus.  Some people politely refused and kept walking, but quite a few people, at least from my observation, took them up on the offer.  It bore fruit!

Here was Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament on the altar and people praying and light candles on the steps of the sanctuary and throughout the church, some taking advantage to talk to a priest, and then students warmly greeting people as they came in and giving them candles, and other students literally “branching out” across downtown on a Saturday night to invite anybody and everybody to come and sit and reflect.  It was a “flesh and blood” image of that marble sanctuary from my old seminary.  It was a flesh and blood image of the vine and the branches.  And it seems to me that it is just this sort of evangelizing community that we are called to be as the Body of Christ, as branches on the Vine.

And so, prayer, penance and community – through these, we will grow and bear much.  “I am the vine, you are the branches.”