Jesus, The True Vine - We Are The Branches

Around this time last year, I signed up to be an “Angel.” This was not in the company of God’s Angels in Heaven and on Earth but with a wine club here in Australia called Naked Wines. It is a club comprising private and small-scale wine growers across Australia and New Zealand.

Anyone can purchase wine through Naked Wines, delivered to your home within three or four days anywhere in Australia.

After three purchases, the club invites individual wine lovers to become angels. Becoming an angel means opening an account at Naked Wines and making a small monthly contribution. While the contribution remains yours to purchase wines anytime, the contributions angels make go to supporting small-scale winegrowers in many ways to ensure their wineries are sustainable.

You get to enjoy a special privilege when you become an angel. That is the privilege of personally getting to know and then talking or corresponding with the winegrowers whose wines you particularly like. In doing so, you get to develop a personal relationship with the wine grower and ask any questions that you would like to know about the wine. Candidly, they answer any questions you may ask them.

We exchange recipes for cuisines that may match a particular wine and post photos of the dishes on the wine grower’s website to entice others to buy the wines and enjoy the cuisines you have cooked.

In February this year, the angels got together and bought wines from a wine grower severely affected by the tariffs and China's ban on Australian wines.

Besides wanting to taste nice wines from Australia and New Zealand, there was another reason to join the club. I had wanted to do this since I first studied the Gospel of John as a theological student in Sri Lanka. I studied this chapter of John based on an imaginary understanding of a vine.

There are a few wineries in the highlands of Sri Lanka, but as a twenty-year-old theological student in the mid-eighties, there was no way of travelling to the highlands to visit a winery, let alone to taste wine.

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the appearance of a grapevine. I knew little about it until I became an angel and started talking with wine growers.

I learnt that in your average vineyard, the vines are rather sculptured. If they grow wild and find their own shape, the fruit is inaccessible to the fruit pickers, and anyway, there is not as much of it. Careful pruning in the winter not only gives the vines a more accessible shape but ensures that they will have a lot more fruit.

The first thing you notice about this sculptured shape of the grapevines is that there is a distinct trunk to the vine and then a thick, tangled mass of branches at about shoulder height. The branches are so profuse and tangled and heavily leaf-clad that without careful examination, it is difficult to tell one branch from another, and it is almost impossible to tell where one ends and the next one begins.

I wanted to share my experience learning about wine growing and all that goes into producing tasty wine for your glass to help us understand Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel reading.

He says: “I am the vine, and you are the branches”. Well, if you visit a winery and look at the vines contemplating the meaning of that statement, you will first realise that this is not a promise that you will stand out from the pack in some unique way or receive any great fame or recognition.

This is an illustration of the members of the church and their relationship to Jesus and God.

Other illustrations in Paul’s epistles allow more significant differentiation between the members of the church. For example, in his letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul uses the illustration of the human body to talk about the church members. There, he says that the eye and the foot cannot disown one another because they are part of the body. Then, he emphasizes that the eye and the foot have recognizably different contributions to the body.

However, Jesus's illustration indicates a radically non-hierarchical view of the church: “I am the vine, and you are the branches,” a tangled, indistinguishable mass with one purpose and one purpose only—to produce fruit.

Then, in verse one, Jesus goes on to say, “My father is the winegrower,”

Because Jesus had illustrated the vine so lovingly, I asked many winegrower friends whether they had a favourite branch in their vineyard. All of them have told me, despite their caring for the vines lovingly, there are only two types of branches – the ones that produce fruit and ones that don’t. The ones that don’t produce fruit get pruned off, so then there’s only one type of branch. Of the good ones, no branch stands out as any more important than any other. They’re just all in together, tangled up and producing fruit.