Remain in Me

There is an old saying that perhaps you have heard before: “If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.” This idea is often used in business, but it can extend to other things, too – sports, politics, social justice, science and technology, even personal relationships like friendships or marriage. The idea in all these areas is that it is impossible to maintain a status quo: either you are trying to move forward, to improve and progress, or else you are falling behind.

This notion also has relevance for our relationship with God. In our spiritual lives, we are always either moving forward or moving backward; there is no middle ground. But our spiritual lives differ in one important way from those other endeavors I mentioned earlier: God acts alongside us. In today’s Gospel, Jesus commands his disciples to go and bear fruit; bearing fruit is the measure by which every disciple will be judged. Notice, though, *how* Jesus commands them to bear fruit. He doesn’t say, “Work really hard,” or “Pray a lot.” Rather, he says, “Remain in me.” Remaining – remaining in Jesus – is the first step in bearing fruit. In fact, Jesus says it is not possible to bear fruit unless we begin exactly there, by remaining in him: “without me you can do nothing,” he says.

Abbott Fuller Graves, Flowering Vines on Palm Tree (c. 1930)

This is so important for understanding our spiritual lives correctly. It can be very easy to fall into the trap of thinking we can do it all by ourselves, or that we have to: that God wants us to strive and struggle on our own to be good, to do what he commands, thereby proving ourselves worthy of him. This idea has been around a long time, and it is not just unhelpful – it is dangerously wrong. The idea that we don’t need God’s help to be good, or that he wants us to somehow be good apart from him, was condemned long ago as the heresy of Pelagianism, but it still pops up all the time in different and subtle ways. Instead, the Church teaches that we need the grace of God to be good, to fulfill his commandments, to bear fruit, exactly as Jesus says the Gospel, and, what’s more, God wants to give us that grace.

If we need God’s help, and God wants to help us, then why can the spiritual life be so hard at times? The answer is often that we fail at that first step: remaining in him. If we don’t fall victim to thinking we can do it on our own, then we allow something else to knock us out of relationship with him – what we call sin. Every day we face temptations to sin that threaten to pull us out of the relationship of grace we have in Christ, temptations that come both from diabolical influence (which sounds scary, but it is how the devil most often tries to bother us) as well as from human weakness: our ingrained bad habits, our shifting temperaments, all the ups and downs of daily lived experience. Jesus tells us to remain in him precisely because he knows we will face constant challenges in doing just that. The starting point, then, in bearing fruit must always be him, not us: his grace, his action, his work.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we are passive. Having received his grace, we do have to make progress, as I said at the beginning – moving forward so as not to fall behind. A good analogy of how to think of progress in our spiritual lives is a story we all learned as children, the fable of the tortoise and the hare. The slow and cautious tortoise challenges the quick but boastful hare to a race. The hare is so confident that he will win that, halfway through the race, he decides he has time to take a nap; he wakes up just in time to see the tortoise about to cross the finish line. In the spiritual realm, the temptation is to be the hare: to be overconfident in our own abilities or to feel very self-assured of our own spiritual position. But if we become lax in moving ahead, we may endanger our ability to finish the race well – to bear fruit by remaining in the grace of Christ until death. It is much better to imitate the tortoise: making slow and steady progress, little by little each day, keeping the focus on God so as not to become too confident in ourselves.

The Hare and the Tortoise (1809) by Samuel Howitt 

Perhaps then we can see how, in the end, our spiritual lives do involve striving and struggling – but never on our own, never apart from God, but always by remaining in him and calling upon his grace. For that reason, whenever we feel distant from God, or he from us, it is best to first consider whether we have allowed ourselves to drift away from him: perhaps falling out of our rhythm of prayer, perhaps not receiving the sacraments frequently, especially Eucharist and confession, perhaps by focusing our attention too much on ourselves and not enough on the Lord. Maybe what we need is to get plugged in again to Jesus, returning to remaining in him, receiving in a new way what he is already wanting to give us in order that we may bear fruit.

With the grace of this Eucharist, friends, let’s continue to make slow and steady progress in our spiritual lives, moving always forward, that as we remain in Jesus and he in us, we may go and bear fruit for him in the world.