The Vine and the Branch (1 of 2)

It is Thursday night in Jerusalem. The week is Passover week. The year is 30 or 33, by the best historical reckoning, and Jesus has just finished a meal with his closest disciples in a borrowed upper room somewhere in the city. He has washed their feet. He has broken bread with them and passed a cup. Judas has gone out into the night. The eleven who remain do not yet know how short the time is. Jesus knows. In a few hours, he will be arrested in a garden across the Kidron Valley. By tomorrow afternoon he will be dead.

In the time between the meal and the garden, He gives them an extended discourse — chapters 13 through 17 of John's Gospel, the longest sustained teaching Jesus gives in any of the Gospels, delivered to a small group of men who will need to carry what he is saying after he is no longer visibly with them.

At the center of the discourse, in John 15, He gives them an image. He says He is the true vine. He says His Father is the vinedresser. He says they are the branches. He says the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. He says it again and again — more than ten times in eleven verses — the same verb in different forms. Abide. Remain. Stay. Do not leave.

The verb is meno. To remain where you are. It is not the verb of striving, or climbing, or achieving. It is the verb of staying. In English the standard translation is abide, which carries the right freight — abide has the sense of dwelling, of taking up residence, of settling in. But the Greek is more ordinary than that. It just means: remain. Stay put. Do not leave.

What abiding does not mean has to be cleared away before what it does mean can land. Abiding is not the construction of the connection. The disciple did not graft himself into the vine. No branch grafts itself. The grafting is the work of the vinedresser, done from outside the branch, on the branch's behalf, without the branch's prior consent and without the branch's contribution. The disciple cannot, by any internal exertion, make himself a branch in the vine of Christ. The grafting has been done or it has not. Where it has been done, the disciple does not need to keep doing it. Where it has not been done, no amount of doing-it-himself accomplishes it.

Abiding is also not anxious self-examination. The branch does not check itself hourly to verify that it is still connected to the vine. The branch is busy doing what branches do — drawing sap, leafing, flowering, bearing fruit. The connection is the gift the branch lives inside, not a status the branch monitors. The anxious religious posture that keeps checking the connection treats the connection as fragile and the disciple as responsible for its maintenance. Neither is the case. The vinedresser is attentive. The vine is alive. The branch's job is not to audit the relationship. The branch's job is to remain in it.

And abiding is not passivity. The branch is alive. The branch is doing the work of being a branch, which is real work — growing, leafing, flowering, ripening fruit. Abiding is not the cessation of activity. Abiding is the right relationship between the activity and the source. The activity is the natural product of the connection. It is not the means by which the connection is sustained.

What abiding is, then, is the simplest thing in the disciple's life and the hardest. It is remaining in the place the Spirit has put you and letting the sap that is sent through you do what sap does.

Jesus puts it as plainly as it can be put in John 15:5:

"Apart from me you can accomplish nothing." — John 15:5 (NET) (NLM verification pending)

That sentence has been quoted often enough that its edge has dulled. Read it again. Without Him you can accomplish nothing. Not nothing impressive — nothing. Not nothing eternal — nothing. The disciple disconnected from the vine produces no fruit. The disciple connected to the vine produces fruit by definition. The whole question of the Christian life is which of those two states is the case.

Jesus Himself names the content of the abiding four verses later. John 15:9:

"Just as the Father has loved me, I have also loved you; remain in my love." — John 15:9 (NET) (NLM verification pending)

Meinate en tē agapē tē emē — remain in the love that is mine. The verb is the same verb the chapter has been working with. The object of the abiding has now been named. The branch does not merely abide in the vine. The branch abides in the love between the Father and the Son, which is what the vine essentially is. The abiding of John 15 and the love-as-essence of 1 John 4:8 are not two different teachings. They are one teaching given on two pages of the same Johannine voice. The knowing-language of the chapter and the love-essence of the second Johannine anchor converge here, in Jesus's own commentary on His own image.