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.
As an illustration of the church, this could not be more different than how we are accustomed to thinking.
“I am the vine, and you are the branches, and my Father is the vine grower.” If that is the way God evaluates us in the church, it doesn’t allow us any basis on which to measure ourselves against one another. It’s not a question of who is more practical, more critical, or bears more significant witness. There is no basis for division or pride. There is not even a division between the faith-filled members and the doubters.
It comes down only to one thing. We abide in Jesus, the vine, or we’re not. If we abide in him, we will be fruitful. And if we do not abide in him, we will be like the branches detached from the vine -- rootless and rapidly drying out.
“Abide in me.” That is about a relationship, not about results. “Abide in me. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches.”
Fruitfulness is a natural consequence of a developing relationship with Jesus Christ. Jesus says, “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” He does not say, “Those who work their guts out at being fruitful, at being loving, just, peaceful, gentle, self-controlled, patient, etc. will by doing so find themselves related to me.” The equation runs the other way around. Strengthen your connection to Jesus, graft yourself firmly onto the vine, draw deeply on the sap that is God’s Spirit, and you will be fruitful.
If, on the other hand, we are not connected to Jesus the vine, we can try as hard as we like to be fruitful, but it won’t get us very far. What happens if we are a branch that is not connected to the vine and we put all our effort into producing fruit or even just a new bud? We will dry out even faster and quickly wither.
God created us to be a fruitful branch firmly connected to Jesus the vine, and we will bring joy to the heart of God by being a fruitful branch firmly connected to Jesus the vine. And we will become a fruitful branch only by being firmly connected to Jesus the vine.
This may surprise us, I know. We live in a culture that constantly tells us that if we want to be worthwhile and productive people, we must strive to stand on our own feet. Most of the time, the image of the hardworking individualist is held up and revered. In a competitive physical world, this may be the truth.
But Jesus is saying here that our fruitfulness is not based on our independence. He says that our fruitfulness is based on our interdependence. We are utterly dependent on Jesus the vine for a healthy root system to ensure our continued fruitfulness. There is no other way.
This relationship with Jesus that brings fruit to bear is developed primarily in prayer.
While I have prayed all my life, I came to learn this truth deeply only three years into my priesthood in 1995. Having completed four years of formal ministry, it came a time when I was asked to go on a retreat for two weeks.
I took the opportunity to go on a retreat that would coincide with a visit to Sri Lanka. I chose to have the retreat in a convent near the Theological College, where I first studied the Gospel of John. I did not make this association at the time.
I chose a Carmelite nun, the Reverend Sr. Rose, to be my retreat director. She was three years senior to me at theological college, so I had to get special permission from the Mother Superior for her to lead my retreat.
Carmelite nuns, as you may know, are cloistered nuns. They take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in their marriage to Jesus. They give up their family, friends, and worldly pursuits to focus on the things of God instead of the things here on earth. Unlike active religious communities, entering a cloister means these nuns are enclosed. According to the laws of enclosure, they have committed themselves to live behind the walls of a monastery for the rest of their life. They can leave the monastery only to visit a doctor or for a parent’s funeral, and their souls are hidden from the world to pray for all of its many needs. Prayer is their work: begging God to help the suffering, lonely, helpless sinners, the whole world.
I was fortunate and blessed to have Sr Rose lead my retreat. I only saw her once in the morning each day, and she directed and calmed my soul as I read God’s Word, reflected, and prayed.
It was only after that retreat that I learned that, contrary to popular belief, prayer does not come naturally. Yes, we do pray in our private moments with God, at public worship, and also with our families and friends. These are the moments when we drink deeply from the sap of the vine, Jesus the vine.
Through the example of Sr Rose and her life as a closeted nun, I learned how deep one can drink and be sustained by the vine's sap.
In this life, neither you nor I are called to a closeted life. But Jesus is calling us to deep communion with him so that we may bear fruit.
God, the vine grower, will do his part, and we can be sure of that. Sometimes we won’t like it, mind you. Sometimes, as Jesus makes it very clear in the passage, even the fruitful branches need some pruning. Going under the knife is never a pleasant experience, even when we know it is for our good.
This pruning may come in many forms. It may come in the form of our wishes not being granted, our lives being tough, or challenges coming our way, either unbearable challenges, sickness, or even an unexpected accident or a change in direction in life. The pruning may come from a challenging spouse, sibling or children.
Looking back or when reflecting on our present lives, we may be able to recognise those moments of pruning.
However, suppose we are about developing our relationship with Jesus and becoming all that God would have us be. In that case, God will treat us in whatever way is necessary to make it happen. He will make us a fruitful branch, deeply rooted through Jesus the vine and bearing fruit to the glory of God. Amen
