A reading of the holy gospel according to John. And Jesus said to his disciples, I am the true vine, and my father is the vine grower. He prunes away every barren branch, but the fruitful branches he trims clean in order to increase their yield. You are already clean, thanks to the word that I have spoken to you. Live on in me as I do in you.
No more than a branch can bear fruit of itself apart from the vine. Can you bear fruit apart from me? I am the vine. You are the branches. He who lives in me and I in him will produce abundantly.
For apart from me, you can do nothing. A man who does not live in me is like a withered, rejected branch, picked up to be thrown into the fire and burnt. If you live in me and my words stay part of you, you may ask what you will. It will be done for you. My father has been glorified in your bearing much fruit and becoming my disciples.
This is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. When our lord uses figures of speech, remember he's using figures of speech, metaphors, allegories, parables, in order to make his meaning clear to his hearers. So consequently, the figure of speech he uses, his references to nature or to human conduct or to the situations of the time, are such as his hearers would understand, such as they saw and knew from experience, not as we today might interpret them from a high school book of science.
We have to keep that in mind. Now today our blessed lord is using this is part of this long discourse, which I've urged you ad nauseam perhaps, but more ad nauseam, I encourage you some more to read it in its entirety at one sitting, just this speech of our Lord. And it'll the impact will be totally different from what you've gotten if you've gotten anything from these atomized offerings each morning. Now, here our Lord's talking in terms of a vine which is the grape. And everybody in his time knew that if you if you loped off a branch, you died.
And so he's he's saying that unless you he's he's referring to this well known observable fact as they saw it, that if a branch of a tree was not associated with the tree, then it just died, it withered, and was fit for nothing but to be burned. Now that's why that's the background that he is appealing to, which his hearers understood thoroughly. So our Lord is saying that unless you are part of me in a vital way, then you are going to wither up and die and be fit for nothing more than to be burnt. Now this isn't just a promise of punishment. This is just his statement of fact that what will happen if you if the branch of a tree dies, separated from the main trunk, the main life of the bush or the or the tree, And then he's saying the same thing is true of you, my followers.
Unless you are part of me, vitally part of me, you're going to die. And then he he in one little sentence, he puts this very succinctly: Without me, you can do nothing. Most of us spend a lot of our lives proving Christ wrong. We try to show, well, we can do it alone. Of course, we don't stand up and make that statement.
We do it in fact. We do it in fact. We say we believe in God's providence. We say we believe in God's love. We we say we believe in God's benevolence.
We say we believe in God's all powerful will. We believe we say we believe that his son said something about sparrows falling from the sky and his heavenly father taking note of each one of them, and we say we believe Christ when he said something about each one of the hairs of our head. Each one is numbered, and not one falls without our heavenly Father's knowledge of it. You know, we say we believe all this stuff. Do we?
Do we? Well, this is no criticism. This is just a fact of life. That is that's a terribly hard thing to believe. Let's not think it's very simple and it that I'm that I'm some some kind of a sluggard or dullard or idiot that I don't believe it, or that I'm unwilling and I don't love God because I don't believe it.
That's the wrong approach. This is a tremendous act of faith. I don't say it's as much of an act of faith as believing in the Holy Eucharist, but it's close to it. And let's face it as a fact, this is asking an awful lot of a plain, good, God fearing human being. And secondly, we see so much to the contrary.
We're not blind. We see what's going on in other people's lives. We see what's going on in my life. Have you gotten everything you've ever prayed for? And yet Christ says it's that's gonna happen.
He said, you may ask what you will, and it will be done you. Has that been your experience? Is that the experience of mankind in general? Read the psalms. Read the psalms, and you will see what the whoever wrote those psalms, what they went through.
So let's not be afraid to admit facts. We are asked here, commanded in fact, to to to make a tremendous act of faith in God, in his love, in his power, in his benevolence. Yeah. Absolutely. That's what we're asked to do.
And nowhere did our lord ever promise us that we we would have total light in terms of an explanation When we seem to get an answer, No. No. Of course our prayers are answered, but not always the way we think they should be answered. But our lord is saying here that that without me, you can do nothing. Now, you see, this is the great problem.
If without god, without Christ, and being part of him, I can do nothing, then what is my share in doing something? Now this is the great problem that I've touched on many times and which was one of one of the dramatic critical problems of Reformation times. Because if you take Saint Paul and take this text of our Lord, it would see that I have nothing to do. All I have to do is to buy myself self a first rate rocking chair and rock myself into eternity. God will do everything for me.
That's very and and that I can't do anything, so why try? You see how easy it is to get into that book of and you can get texts out of Saint Paul which will almost justify this. And Luther did. So this is a tremendous problem. And don't be afraid to say it is.
Don't be afraid to say, look, my experience has been the opposite of this. And yet I believe. Yet I believe. Because the whole point of religion is not that we see, but that we don't see. That's the whole idea.
Faith means a conviction and assent to something I don't see, to something I don't understand, to something I don't grasp, to something that I do not know in any human way of knowing, empirically or by deduction. That's the whole essence of faith. People will say seeing is believing. That's an absurdity. If you see something, you can't believe it.
You can't put your hand in over a burner on your cook stove and you start feeling some heat and you say, I believe I'm getting burned. If you say it, you're you're using the word belief in an absurd sense of the word. I know we do this, but the point is that doesn't make it right. Faith by definition means I give a firm assent, And some people have given such a firm assent that they put their head on a block for it, and that's pretty firm assent. Saint Thomas More did it.
All those Carthusian monks did it with him to mention John Fisher did it, just to mention it. Oh, an infinitesimal fraction of men and women who have given their lives for what they believe, not for what they saw, not for the truth of what they found by reason or empirical science, not for what some human being told them, but for what they took to be the word of God. They gave their all for it. So faith is a powerful thing, but let's realize what we're dealing with. And then we have to come back to our blessed Lord.
Without me, you can do nothing. But that doesn't mean we don't have something to do. Think of that statue business up in Belgium. The statue was restored without the hands. Couldn't find the hands after the first World War.
So somebody put description on under the statue of Christ, I have no other hands than yours. There it is in a nutshell. There's a mystery here. Don't ask me to explain it all, but this is what it is. I can do nothing without Jesus Christ, and yet there is something I have to do that is truly mine, that I am its agent, I am the responsible cause.
So the two have to go together. Even a branch on a tree has some life of its own. And the human being, when it participates in the life of Christ, doesn't lose its sense of responsibility. It doesn't lose its sense of obligation, it does not lose its autonomy, it doesn't lose its power of the will, it doesn't lose its choice, its ability to make right and wrong decisions, none of that is lost. All that Jesus said was, without me, in spite of everything you do, you can do nothing without me.
And with me, he said, ask anything you want, and it will be done to you. Christ said that. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit. Amen.