Abide
Fruitfulness, Part 11:
Abide
June 30, 2024
Pastor Mike
John 15:1-17
“Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (15:4-5).
God calls us to be fruitful. The fruits that God wants us to bear are acts of service that heal and liberate others. Jesus’ teaching about the vine and the branches in John 15 takes us to the heart of the matter. Over the course of this preaching series, we’ve examined the call to fruitfulness, and we’ve explored several of the fears and challenges that obstruct or complicate that call. Jesus now tells us how living the fruitful life is possible: “Abide in me as I abide in you.” The essence of Christian spirituality is contained in those eight words. Here is God’s amazing grace: Christ abides in us. And here is our great responsibility in the light of that grace: we must abide in Christ.
The Greek verb translated here as “abide” is meno. It’s a versatile word that can also be translated as “remain,” “dwell,” “continue,” or “tarry.” Let’s play with these possibilities, just to taste the richness of Jesus’ words.
Remain in me as I remain in you.
Dwell in me as I dwell in you.
Continue in me as I continue in you.
Tarry in me as I tarry in you.
Tarry is an old-fashioned word, but it’s in one of the great hymns: “And the joy we share as we tarry there / none other has ever known.” When we tarry somewhere, we stay longer than we intended; we delay our departure; we lose track of time.
What does it mean that Christ loses track of time in you – that Christ remains, dwells, and continues in you? And what does it mean for you to remain, continue, and dwell in Christ – to lose track of time in him?
One great instance of the word meno being used earlier in John’s Gospel comes from the fourth chapter, which records Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob. After a cautious start to the conversation, the woman receives the love of Jesus, and she runs back to her people in town and tells them to come and meet a man who “told me everything I ever did” (John 4:39). “So, when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to abide with them, and tarried two days” (John 4:40). Two uses of meno. Desire meets desire: Jesus responds to our deep longing for his presence. And all our longing, of course, is rooted in God’s eternal decision to be our loving, saving God.
What Jesus wants to get across in this teaching is that we are made for constant communion with him; we are meant to dwell in him and to make his words our own story. We are created to be branches, rooted in the vine and bringing forth fruit. We are channels of all the life and energy that the vine wants to give us. But we are not the vine. We do not plant or provide for ourselves; we do not determine when it is pruning time or harvest time. We don’t choose what the farmer will do with the fruit. This is good news because it keeps us from thinking we need to be particularly strong or intelligent or creative or influential to live the fruitful life. Jesus wants to give us himself, all that he is, with all the love and power that he has received from his Father in the Holy Spirit. All our striving should be aimed at making a home in him.
Jesus elaborates on what he means by this abiding as the passage unfolds. After saying “abide in me,” he says, “abide in my love.” And then: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” Me, my love, my commandments. My commandments, my love, me. I came across a great quote recently by a twentieth-century French Catholic social worker named Madeleine Delbrêl. She wrote, “[T]he only valid commentary on the Sermon on the Mount is our life.”[1] We come to know the truth of Jesus’ words as we live them – not as we debate or examine or repeat them, but as we practice them. Abiding in Christ is not passive but active. But the activity takes the form of trusting what Christ has told us about who we are and enduring in the way he has set before us. We abide in Christ when we pray, when we take his words to heart, when we serve others as he has served us. And as we abide in him, he promises to abide in us, to give us everything that we need to bear fruit; he promises to be the source of our love and our joy.
When I stood before Bishop Bridgeforth last Sunday for my Commissioning, one of the things he asked me was, Will you be faithful in prayer, in the study of the Holy Scriptures, and with the help of the Holy Spirit continually rekindle the gift of God that is in you? He could just as easily have said, “Will you abide in Christ, as Christ abides in you?” But I love that liturgical language: rekindling the gift of God that is in you…
What does that mean for you? How do you continually rekindle the gift of God that is in you? There is a gift of God in you – it is Christ himself! How will you open yourself to him? How will you set yourself up to lose track of time and tarry with him in prayer, in the scriptures, in compassionate service?
I see at least two ways we might struggle with this passage.
The first is with the idea of pruning. We’re called to bear fruit, but Jesus also says, “Every branch that bears fruit [God] prunes to make it bear more fruit” (15:3). So the abiding, pruning, and fruit-bearing go together; we can’t have one without the others. The metaphor suggests that our growth in Christ depends upon God cutting away all that is superfluous or worn out and unproductive. Our life in Christ moves through this rhythm: harvest time, pruning time, harvest time, pruning time. Part of abiding in Christ means allowing ourselves to be simplified, streamlined, integrated. As we abide in him in prayer, scripture, and service, he will teach us what is essential to our thriving and what is obstructive. Sometimes we are hindered by a material distraction or possession; sometimes we are hung up on old way of thinking, on an old story that no longer serves us about who we are or what the world is like. God makes the cut; and the cut hurts, but it also allows us to channel a greater concentration of divine energy, and to bear more fruit.
The second way we might struggle with this passage is with the black-and-whiteness of it: “apart from me you can do nothing.” Jesus says that it is impossible for us to bear fruit unless we abide in him, and he in us; that if we don’t keep the spiritual channels open, we will whither up and be removed from him.
What does this mean, we might wonder, about those who do not follow Christ but who nevertheless are working for the good of the world?
The literary context of the passage is helpful here. Jesus spoke these words about the vine on the night of his betrayal and arrest. He had just finished washing his disciples’ feet in the upper room, and Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, left to set Jesus’ arrest in motion. With the betrayer gone, Jesus began a new teaching for the remaining eleven, “Abide in me as I abide in you” (15:1).
Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus repeatedly speaks in these metaphorical “I am” statements. “I am the bread of life.” I am the light of the world.” “I am the gate and the good shepherd” “I am the resurrection and the life.” “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Some of these teachings – the bread, the light, the gate – come from the early days of Jesus’ ministry when he was preaching to great crowds. “I am the resurrection and the life” was spoken only to Martha when Jesus came to raise her brother Lazarus from the dead. Audience matters. Jesus has already said that anyone is welcome to find their nourishment in him, to make him the light of their life. But the audience for the vine teaching is not the crowd, not an individual, and not even the twelve disciples, but the eleven. Jesus tells those who would remain with him through the agony of crucifixion and the ecstasy of resurrection, those who would receive the Holy Spirit and become the Church to abide in him. This vine word is a word for the church, for those who “have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you” (John 15:3).
The point, I think, is that Jesus refuses to be an idea among other ideas, or a system among other systems, or a philosophy among other philosophies, or a curiosity among other curiosities. He is a person, the personal God, who wants to give all that he is and has to us. And for him to do that we need to open ourselves completely to him. God is so much vaster and at the same time so much more intimate than we can conceive, and we are called to grow into that vastness, into that intimacy through Christ. The vine is not a teaching aimed at excluding others, it's a teaching aimed at excluding everything in us that would keep us from the pure practice of his love, and the clear experience of his joy. If we want to retain the right to do some things without him, or to live a part of our lives apart from him, then we have not truly understood the promise or call of this abiding. He calls us friends; he wants to make our joy complete; he wants the world to know his love. His perfection, his fullness, requires our wholehearted devotion.
So I’d like to invite us into a time of reflection, and here are the two questions I want you to sit with: What does it look like for you to abide in Christ – and will you do it? Is something inessential being pruned away from you – and will you allow it?
Let’s tarry with these questions in the company of the Holy Spirit or a few minutes, and then we will celebrate the essential truth of our mutual abiding with a baptism.
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Madeleine Delbrêl, The Holiness of Ordinary People, eds. Gilles François and Bernard Pitaud (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2024), 120.