The Fruit of the Vine

In the spirit of our university semester drawing to a close, here's a pop quiz! 

What was the first commandment God gave to human beings? Any guesses? Maybe some of you thought of one of the Ten Commandments, the Law given to Moses for the Israelite people on Mount Sinai. But it is before that. Or you might have thought of the covenant God made with Abraham and his descendants, or God’s command to Noah to build an ark. But it is before that. Or maybe you even thought of God’s commandment to Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Even then, you’d be wrong. 

The first commandment God gave to human beings was given to Adam and Eve, but it was not a warning about sin. Rather, he said, “Be fruitful and multiply.” I always tend to think of this fact about this time of year, when the weather has finally gotten nice, the flowers and trees are blooming, and all of nature seems to be singing. Springtime is an inherent reminder of God’s desire that all of his creation flourish.

Still, what about all of those commandments? Everyone knows that Christianity is a religion with commandments. “Honor your father and mother.” “Do not kill.” “Do not commit adultery.” Don’t eat meat on Fridays during Lent. No sex outside of marriage. Fast for an hour before receiving the Eucharist. And so on, and so on. If God’s desire for us is to flourish – not just to populate the earth, like Adam and Eve – but to prosper in every way, how do a bunch of commandments help us to do that?

We hear the answer in our second reading today. For the past several weeks, this reading has come from the First Letter of John. If you have never read is particular letter straight through, I would encourage you to do so. It is one of the more beautiful explanations of the Christian faith and a simple guide to how to live as a follower of Jesus. The author of the letter – who was most likely either the Apostle John or one of his close followers – speaks about how the apostles and disciples were privileged to follow Jesus in his earthly ministry: to hear him preach, to see him heal, etc. But it was only after his Passion, Death, and Resurrection that they came to understand there is an even more important way of relating to Jesus – through love. Love is the tie that binds every believer to God, whether we have seen Jesus or not. God is love, as St. John says, and we love God because we recognize that he first loved us in Christ. Jesus is the proof of God’s love and the one who has made us like himself, so that we are now called children of God.

Edward Burne-Jones, The Tree of Life (detail), c. 1888

How though do we love God? St. John tells us – by keeping his commandments. That is the heart of the message we have heard in this reading the last few weeks – that the proof of loving God is to do what he has told us. As we heard today, faithfulness is proven not merely in words and speech, through mere lip service. Rather faithfulness is shown by action – by what we do “in deed and in truth” as he says. At the heart of every commandment is the choice of whether to love God in that particular way, to acknowledge that he truly loves us and that apart from him we cannot flourish or prosper. Following the will of God, obeying his commandments – even the ones we don’t like! – are the way in which we remain in the love of God that sustains us.

In the Gospel today, Jesus tells us that apart from him we can do nothing. It sounds almost like an insult; but it is a reminder of how truly we depend upon God's goodness for everything. Think about what commandment of God you are having the most trouble following. Is there a rule of the Church that you don’t like? Is there a commandment that you constantly seem to break? Rather than dismiss that thing as unimportant, or resign yourself to it as something that you can’t overcome, think of it instead as precisely the place that God wants to lift you up and help you to flourish. The life of the Vine is extended to you precisely there, so that as a branch on the tree of God, you can be healed and made whole. Love is the tie that binds you to Jesus, but each of us must open ourselves to receiving the life-giving grace that he wants to communicate.

There is of course a flip side to the image of the vine and branches which is more challenging. As any gardener knows, there are some plants, and some parts of plants that do not flourish. They droop and sag; they do not use the nutrients given to them. They fail to truly bear the life of the Vine within them, and as such, they do not bear fruit. When we fail to keep the Lord’s commandments – when we say, “NO,” to what he asks, or ignore his commandments – then in doing so, we resist the very life that sustains us. The Lord’s command is for us to bear fruit; he wants our relationship with him to flourish so that our life grows and spreads beyond ourselves to touch the lives of others and to communicate to them the same life from the Vine that is within us.

Therefore, we must be pruned. The gardener knows that a plant only truly thrives when it has been formed in the correct way. At times, this means doing something which on the face is counter-intuitive – trimming it back, cutting away parts of its life that are easy and superficial but which prevent fuller and deeper growth. We are pruned as well. Whenever we encounter loss, challenge, grievance, disappointment, hardship, or insult, – in any wound that we suffer – there is a temptation to focus only upon it and upon the pain of that present moment. Instead, the Lord invites us to accept our pruning, to embrace the opportunity of letting go of something – even something good – so that we can cling more fully to him, and stay rooted in the divine life that comes from the Vine.

Friends, our faith does indeed have commandments, and commandments that we must follow, but Christianity is not ultimately a religion defined by rules. Instead, it is the full expression of what God first said to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply.” How connected are you to Christ? Have you remained in him, so that he can remain in you? We are branches on the tree of God, but in order to bear fruit, we must be careful not to separate ourselves from the Vine. The fruit that Jesus expects us to bear is the fruit of faith, hope, and love, the fruit of charitable service, the fruit of self-denial, the fruit of Christian mission, the fruit of spreading the Gospel. May the Eucharist we will soon share – when we will partake of the fruit of the vine transformed into the Lord’s Heavenly Vintage to nourish us – help us to remain rooted in him, so that we can bear much fruit.

Jesus the Lawyer

A few years ago, a priest friend of mine sent me a few jokes. They were jokes about lawyers:

Q: How can a pregnant woman tell that she's carrying a future lawyer?
A: She has an uncontrollable craving for baloney.

Q: What do you call a smiling, courteous person at a bar association convention?
A: The caterer.

Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and a trampoline?
A: You take off your shoes before you jump on a trampoline.

Now that I’ve offended any lawyer or law student out there, let me explain why I mention these. I received these as I was heading to Washington DC to study canon law, the law of the Church. Much like regular lawyers, canon lawyers often get a bad rap among priests, and I guess my friend wanted to remind me not to let my studies go to my head.

There was one joke that he sent which especially caught my attention.

Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and God?
A: God doesn't think he's a lawyer.

Now, for any lawyers in the room, the fact that they are in church is probably a pretty good indication that they don’t think they’re God. But that punch line – “God doesn’t think he’s a lawyer” – is that true? You might think, "Of course, it’s true." But if you know your Bible, you might actually start to think it’s not. You might say that God – or more precisely, Jesus – is a kind of lawyer. Let me explain better what I mean.

Throughout the Scriptures, the Bible uses imagery to explain the relationship between God and humanity. A lot of these images we are familiar with, and a lot of them come from Jesus. There’s the vine and the branches, the Good Shepherd and the sheep, the Master of the House and the servants who await his return, the owner of the vineyard and the tenants who work it. You can go on and on.

But there’s another imagery often used in the Bible, and that is legal imagery. The images of the law – judge and trial and sentence – are used especially in the Old Testament to symbolize what it is like when humanity falls astray. As the people of God, we are in covenant with him – bound to him in a heavenly contract, if you will – and when we sin, we violate that covenant, and we are held accountable before the law. We stand before God, guilty of our sins, and we deserve the punishment that is our due. God is infinitely merciful – but he is also infinitely just, and so he must hand down the sentence that the law prescribes.

But today, in the second reading, we heard something very important. In his first letter, the apostle John says, “My children, I am writing this to you so that you may not commit sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one.” The word “Advocate” there is deliberately chosen: it means “helper” and “intercessor,” but it also has a legal connotation. Jesus, it seems, is a kind of lawyer.

Now, we like to poke fun at lawyers, as I did at the start of the homily. But if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that lawyers are actually very important. They perform very important, very helpful tasks. For one, they interpret the law – judges and legal scholars tell us what the law means and how it applies in our lives. And other lawyers represent us when we run afoul of the law – these attorneys, or advocates, stand on our behalf to argue our case.

When St. John says that Jesus is our "Advocate", he means precisely that. Jesus stands before the Father on our behalf, arguing our case. As we will hear in the Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer today, Jesus “defends us and ever pleads our cause” before his heavenly Father. He does so because he himself is righteous – that is, in the eyes of the law, he is blameless, without sin. We are not – we have sinned – but because a Righteous One takes up our cause on our behalf, we are made righteous too. Once guilty, we are shown mercy because of the righteousness of Jesus. Though we deserve to receive a sentence, we are made innocent instead.

The analogy goes even deeper. Jesus the Lawyer not only has made us innocent; he has himself borne the weight of the Law’s penalty on our behalf. Imagine a legal counsel who willingly accepts the punishment his client rightfully deserves – even the best lawyer would never do that! But Jesus has freed us from the sentence of the old law of sin and death and has written a new law within our hearts: the law of charity, the law of sacrificial love – his Law.

What does God ask in return? Faithfulness, and to be a witness to his great love. In today's first reading, Peter invites the people of Jerusalem to recognize that by their own sins they were responsible for the death of Jesus; but God has shown them mercy by raising him to new life, and so now he calls them to be a witness to this transformation by turning away from sin, embracing the new life that comes from the Resurrection, and bearing witness to the love God has shown us in Jesus.

James Tissot, The Appearance of Christ at the Cenacle (c. 1894)

In the Gospel we heard, the Risen Jesus appears again to his disciples. They are frightened at his coming: unsure perhaps of how he can be alive again, unsure of whether he will hold their past abandonment against them. Instead, he wishes them "Peace." He reminds them that all has happened according to the will of God – of how all that the Scriptures once foretold has at last been accomplished through his rising from the dead. The disciples, he says, are “witnesses of these things.”

So, too, does the Risen Jesus call us to be his witnesses in the world. To do so, we need to stand apart from the sinfulness we see around us. With our Advocate with us, made righteous by his free gift, we must be holy to such a degree that others take notice and are inspired to make Jesus their Advocate as well. That is the mission he has given to us. We should never let the times that we fall short from this calling discourage us from turning back to him – to trust again in our Advocate, who restores us to righteousness so that we can be good witnesses once again. 

My friends, in this Easter season, we remember that we have the universe’s best Advocate in our corner. Even the greatest defense attorney in the world would never do what Jesus has done for us, for he has borne our sentence on our behalf, and restored us to righteousness in the sight of God. But Jesus’s assistance didn’t come to an end with his Passion, Death, and Resurrection. He continues to aid us each and every day – indeed, every moment – interceding for us with the Father, pouring out his Spirit to us, sending us heavenly gifts of grace to inspire us to holiness. The Risen Lord has changed the world; he has changed our hearts; and he continues to lead us – and we are witnesses to these things. And that, praise God, is not a joke.

Easter: The Silent Victory

The American author F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.” While only he knew his exact meaning, his words can be understood in at least two ways. An optimistic interpretation is that every hero has a backstory, some tragic difficulty or challenge that they have overcome in order to become who they are. A more pessimistic interpretation is that every hero is a figure waiting to fall, victorious at one moment but destined inevitably for later decline or defeat. 

According to the values of the world, the life of Jesus of Nazareth was heroic in many ways. He upended narrow ways of thinking, he preached the importance of mercy and compassion, he paid attention to the poor, the marginalized, and the outcast. But as heroic as his life may have been, when viewed through the lens of this world, one cannot help but conclude Jesus’s story ends in tragedy, because despite his goodness he was finally rejected, captured, abused, murdered.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Two Disciples at the Tomb (c. 1906)

Of course, we are here today because as Christians we do not view things only through the lens of the world. We have because we believe in the Resurrection – that is, to make the claim in faith that after suffering a truly human death, this Jesus of Nazareth was then raised from the dead; not to live for a time and then suffer death again, like his friend Lazarus, but risen in such a way that death no longer has any power over him. For us he suffered the slings and arrows of human sinfulness, for us he shed his blood, but God has raised him to a new and eternal life.

Still, it might occur to us, “But where is Jesus?” In the Gospel from John that we just heard, we can feel this question implicitly in the story. Early in the morning, Mary Magdalene goes early in the morning to anoint the dead Jesus. But he is not there. Simon Peter and the other disciple come to see for themselves, and they too see that he is gone. The Easter account from Mark says that Jesus is not there, because “he has been raised.” How strange! We might expect that after his very public suffering and death, the Resurrection of Jesus would be an event that no one would possibly miss or mistake or fail to recognize. If we were writing the story, we would make certain that all would see that the Hero of God is not defeated, but victorious indeed! And yet the Resurrection of Christ happens silently, in secret. Just what is God up to?

We can summarize his purpose in one word: faith. Recently, I saw an interview with former President Jimmy Carter about a new book that he has written on faith. The interviewer asked him why faith was so important, and he said he thought faith was the key to existence. He referenced the eighteenth chapter of Luke, and Jesus’s words, “When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on the earth?” The former president then went on talk about it’s important to have faith in ourselves, in other human beings, in our ability to make the world a more decent place.

With all due respect to Mr. Carter, that is not the faith that Jesus was talking about. If there is one thing that Jesus desired to do throughout his life, it was to move us to faith – not faith in some abstract, general sense, but faith personally in him, faith that he was sent by God for our salvation. All of those things that he did in his ministry – reaching out to the marginalized, preaching compassion and mercy – those things which even non-believers can admire: all of them were intended to bring us to believe in him. Even his death on the Cross was an invitation to faith. Why? Because faith ultimately is what saves, faith is what reconciles us to God, faith is what gives us eternal life. Without faith in the Son of God, we could see the Resurrection itself happen and it would profit us nothing. What Jesus wants, then and now, for us to have faith in one thing: that he is Risen from the dead, physically, in the flesh, and that having Ascended he sits at the right side of his Father in heaven and continues to intercede for us. It is an extraordinary claim – something so amazing that it is almost unbelievable. But it is believable, with faith, and we are the ones who believe it.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Three Marys (c. 1910)

At the Easter Vigil last night, our church rejoiced to welcome into full initiation in the Christian mysteries those men and women who through months of discernment and prayer have come to have faith in the Risen Jesus and who have found a new and fuller relationship with him in our Catholic communion. By the power of Christ, they were sealed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit so that the faith that has brought them here will now move them, and us, to give witness to the Lord in how we live.

Like them, our presence in this church today is a sign that we stand ready to give testimony to this faith we possess. We have come to believe in the Resurrection; now we strive to bring others to the same faith. So many today are looking for a reason to hope; so many want to believe in a good and merciful God, who will answer the evil we see so evident; so many feel within themselves a longing that is unfulfilled, a desire to find something in life that really is momentous. To them and to all, we are ready to answer, to respond in faith that: “Death is not the final word! The Grave is not our final resting place! Oblivion is not the fate that awaits us! For the Tomb is empty; he has been raised, as he said.” There is no work we can do that is more important, more essential than continuing to share that Good News, which we have come to believe. And share it we must until the Day we and indeed all the world see the Risen Christ return in his Glorious Body at the end of all things.

So, “where is Jesus?” Right here. With eyes of faith we can see him – present in our hearts through the power of the Holy Spirit, present in the midst of this assembly, and especially present in the sacramental signs which are instruments of his grace. We hear his voice in the prayers we offer through his Sonship; we see him in the works of charity we do in his Name, in the service we render to others out of love for him, in the daily living out of that vocation by which he has called each of us to holiness and newness of life. As we await his glorious Second Coming, we look for him not in some far-off place, but in faith, we recognize he is still here.

Friends, perhaps it is true like Scott Fitzgerald thought that every human story, even a heroic one, ends in tragedy. But in the divine story, announced by the mouth of God, and written anew upon our hearts in faith, there is no longer any tragedy. There is only the victory that our Hero has won. May the Risen Christ, truly here, present among us, strengthen us in our faith, that we may always announce his triumph to others, and by our manner of living point the way to his fullness of life.