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“I AM the true vine,” Jesus said to His disciples. “I AM.” Ego eimi, in the Greek. When Jesus says, “I am,” Jews take notice. Their ears perk up, and they pay attention. These are the words that Moses heard from the burning bush, when he asked the Lord God who he should tell the Israelites had sent him to lead them out of captivity. “I AM WHO I AM,” Yahweh had said. “Tell them, ‘I AM’ has sent me unto you.” “I AM” are the words and the name of God.
Jesus had spoken this phrase, “I AM,” on several occasions. Usually, it was when He was describing how He, the Anointed One, was fulfilling one of the prophecies of God. How He, the Son, was making up for all the shortcomings of Israel.
How He was succeeding, in contrast to all the times they had failed, in living up to the covenants the Lord had established with them.
Jesus had gradually revealed His identity throughout His ministry, letting people know that the Christ, the Messiah, had indeed come. In each of Jesus’ “I AM” statements, He claimed an authority, a power, that the Jews believed was reserved for God alone. And so, with each of His statements, as it becomes clearer and clearer that He is the Chosen One, the resistance of those who expected a savior on their own terms grows. Their charges of blasphemy against Jesus increase. Their hatred and jealousy overwhelm them.
“I AM the bread of life,” Jesus first tells them. Then, later, “I AM the light of the world.” Then, “I AM the gate,” and—as we heard last week—“I AM the good shepherd.” These were soon followed by, “I AM the resurrection and the life,” and then, “I AM the way, and the truth, and the life.”
Finally, then, Jesus makes another “I AM” statement. This time, however, He doesn’t make it a public proclamation of His divine nature or His Messiahship. His words, “I AM the true vine,” are said in private, to His disciples in the seclusion of the Upper Room, on the night in which He was betrayed.
He is speaking to those who already knew Him to be the Messiah, who already believed Him to be the fulfillment of all the prophecies which the people of Israel had ignored. He spoke of Himself as the vine to those who were to be His branches, those who He was charging with bearing much fruit once He had suffered, died, arisen, and departed in glory. The branches to whom He spoke that evening are the seedling members of the body of Christ, those who would become the first tender, green shoots of His Church.
And here, in identifying Himself as the vine and the Father as the gardener, Jesus again places Himself as the connection between God and man. In the book of Isaiah, the prophet likens Israel and Judah to a vineyard, carefully built and lovingly maintained by a gardener. But the vineyard had yielded only bad fruit, so the Gardener decided that he was going to take away the wall and hedge that protected it. He will let it be trampled and destroyed, overrun with weeds, left untended, left to dry out and wither.
And so it had—Israel was destroyed by Assyria, Judah was overrun by Babylon, until only a remnant of God’s chosen people remained. Carried off; once again placed into captivity. And after those surviving exiles finally returned to Palestine to re-start the Jewish nation, that vineyard went untended for years and years—the Gardener sent them no prophets; the Vineyard Owner did not soothe and nourish them with new, rich waters of His Word.
Yet, even when God had turned a deaf ear to the nation of Israel on account of their unrighteousness; even when He ignored their demands for salvation in the fashion that they wanted it, and after He gave them over to their sin and to their enemies, He did not abandon them. He continued to bear them up in His hand and protect them from complete destruction.
But then, in due time, God sent John the Baptist—immersing Israel in the same cool waters of the Jordan across which the nation had traveled to enter their promised resting place so many centuries before. And close on John’s heels came a new vine; a single new shoot from the stump of Jesse—the true vine, Christ Jesus. From that one vine would come the righteousness that was lacking in all the other vines of the vineyard of Israel; the one vine that would remain when all the others had been leveled to the ground and uprooted.
That vine is solid and healthy. That vine is deeply set in rich soil, cared for by the Gardener, regularly fed and watered, and He has high hopes for it. The Gardener will not let the branches on this vine wither; nor will He let these branches simply get thick and lush with green leaves and bear no fruit. He wants fruit. He expects fruit. And He will have His fruit, one way or another.
And so it is for us as well. Through the gift of faith, God has taken us—broken, withered, and diseased by sin—and grafted us as branches into the solid, healthy, perfect vine: Jesus Christ. We receive the soothing, refreshing waters of baptism, and are fed by His Word and His Holy Supper. The Gardener does all that is necessary for His branches to grow healthy in the vine, and to bear much fruit.
But that doesn’t mean that everything always goes smoothly for the branches. Far from it. Sometimes pruning is necessary for a plant to be healthy and strong. Sometimes excess growth has to be cut away for the branches to bear fruit.
Jesus says that the trials and struggles in our lives are God pruning us so that we may bear good fruit in our lives. Martin Luther on this text calls these trials and struggles the manure and pruning clippers of our lives. If you were a branch of a vine, Luther wrote, you must admit that there are things that would happen to you that would be hard to understand. Why does the gardener keep cutting off limbs and branches? Why does the gardener keep piling manure up all around me? It stinks and I don’t like it!
So why does the gardener do these things? The gardener does these things because He knows what is best for the vine and its branches. The gardener knows that too many limbs will choke the fruits, and that the vine must be fertilized in order to grow and be fruitful.
One of the earliest Christian martyrs was a man named Ignatius, a disciple of the apostle John. Ignatius was arrested and taken to Rome to be torn apart by wild beasts in the arena. When this was about to happen, Ignatius said, “Let them come! I am God’s kernel of grain. He must crush and grind me in the mill before He can use me.”
This is a very different way of looking at Christian suffering, isn’t it? Certainly it is horrible that wild beasts killed Ignatius. But Ignatius, in faith, could see that God would use these terrible events to serve as a witness to the Gospel.
As Luther put it, “Ignatius looks upon the terrible teeth of the wild lions and bears as nothing else than God’s millstone with which he must be ground to powder in order that he may be prepared as a good cake for God.”
In some parts of the country, springtime brings tornado season, and other violent weather. Thunderstorms and strong winds can damage trees, tearing weaker branches from the trunk and depositing them far away. If these branches had not broken off, the entire tree might have been uprooted. Branches whose burden is too great for the tree to bear under stress are shed for the sake of the tree. Those trees that come down altogether clear room for future trees to grow. The trees are wounded, but with care and attention, they will heal. Destruction gives way to rebirth.
Similarly, spring and summer increase the risk of forest fires. While environmentalists lament the scorching of thousands of acres of trees, and government agencies spend untold millions to battle the blazes, these destructive fires are an essential part of the growth and renewal of the forest. The fires clear out underbrush which draws moisture and nutrients away from the timber, making future growth healthier. In some cases the heat from the fire is also an essential agent in releasing the seeds from the pinecones of certain species of valuable trees. God’s creation always has a way.
In the same way, God sometimes throws a rough storm into our path. Or, He might let the flames of fire lick at us and singe our outward being. It is important that we realize this, and not lose heart.
The bad things that happen in our lives are sometimes God’s way of pruning us, the branches who are to bear His fruit in the world. The difficulties and obstacles we face can be His way of chastening us when we’ve grown too lush and thick on the fat things of this world.
Unlike the fires of hell which would torment us forever if not for our salvation in Jesus, God’s fire is only temporary. His fire tempers us like steel, and burns away the impurities in our lives.
By this pruning and burning, God trims and shapes our individual lives, driving us toward repentance to draw ever closer into the real dependence we have on Christ, the vine. His cutting away of the excesses and the distractions of this world allows us to become healthier branches, focused on those things which further His kingdom and which bear much fruit.
Likewise, He cuts off those branches which bear no fruit at all. In His perfect knowledge, He knows which branches are hypocrites and false believers. Those He will cast into the real, eternal fire—fire which does not purify, but only punishes.
So it will also be for those who break themselves off from the vine, who do not remain connected to Christ, and who separate themselves from the nourishment of Word and Sacrament. They wither; they dry out; they become brittle; and eventually they snap loose in the winds of change and fall away. These branches, too, are fit only for consumption in the flames.
But it is not so for you. You have been grafted firmly into the trunk of the vine, into the solid center of the Church, Jesus Christ. And intertwined with that vine, irrevocably connected to Christ, is His bride, the Church. The holy and precious mother in whom all Christians are linked.
And within Mother Church the saving lifeblood of Christ, the very Spirit of salvation sent by the Father, the Gardener, now courses through her veins and brings life to the branches. Life that comes in faith by hearing, comes in washing and regeneration in the flood of baptism, comes in the feeding of the branches in Christ’s holy meal.
We know and confess that our one God certainly works for us and in us in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christ’s Father is our eternal Father, too, the good Gardener who prunes us so that we might bear much fruit. And Jesus Christ, through His death and our baptism into that death, is our eternal Brother, linking us firmly into Himself, the strong vine. And the Holy Spirit has called us to faith through God’s Word, and daily keeps us attached to that vine.
On this Mother’s Day, we can also look to Christ’s bride, our collective Mother—the “one, holy, Christian, and apostolic Church,” as we confess it—as our connection to our God and Lord and to the fellowship of all believers. So Mother’s Day is a good day to remember that our loving Father provides through our loving Mother Church the nurturing care and nourishment of Word and Sacrament. He gives us all that we truly need to continue to grow into strong, healthy, mature Christians.
In your grafting into the vine of Christ, and by extension into that nurturing Mother who is inextricably and eternally wed to Christ, this same God uses the bad things in your life to prune you and make you stronger branches. He feeds you with His life in the Lord’s Supper. He gives you His body and His blood, so that you may be nourished and refreshed in your sometimes-difficult journey.
It’s no accident that Jesus calls Himself the true vine. It is from the fruit of that vine in Holy Communion that you regularly receive His nourishing and life-giving Spirit. And God the Father, the Great Gardener, looks down upon you and sees the good fruit of your life, brought about by the work of that Spirit as it flows from the vine. As Jesus told His disciples in our text, He has cleansed you by His Word that He has spoken to you, and He loves you with the very core of His being. Jesus is the vine; you are the branches; remain in Him, and bear much fruit. In Jesus’ name (+). Amen.
