Producing the fruit of Christ

Our Lady of the Vine

(Jn 15:1-8) Jesus said to his disciples: "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and every one that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit. You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you. Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither; people will gather them and throw them into a fire and they will be burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you. By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples."

As I listened to today’s Gospel reading, I couldn’t help but think about my apricot tree. I love apricots. I planted two apricot trees about 30 years ago in my back yard, shortly after Marilyn and I moved in. We were told that we should plant two trees so that they would “cross-pollinate”—whatever that means. One of the trees has produced fruit every single year. The other produced fruit, but the apricots were never any larger than a large walnut, and the flavor was bitter. The apricots on this tree never seemed to ripen right.

A couple of years after we moved in we decided we needed an actual garage, and the poor producing tree was a casualty of the build. That was great, because I was tired of raking up the leaves and cleaning up the fruit that dropped off of a tree that may or may not have been “cross-pollinating” another tree. It certainly wasn’t good for anything else. It was like it didn’t know that it could be strengthened by the “cross-pollination” of the other.
I figured that since the trees were about 4 years old by this time, the better producing tree might be able to stand alone with proper pruning.

That first year without it’s “sister”, the remaining tree did produce fruit, but it looked a lot smaller than in the previous three years. Since I had never pruned the trees before (I was relying on the “cross-pollination), I asked my father-in-law to help me prune it—because he knew a lot more about this kind of thing that I ever did or ever will—and the apricots that next summer were the largest and sweetest they had ever been!

As long as I kept pruning the tree after that, it produced a good yield of good-tasting fruit. If I tried to rush through the pruning and made the wrong cuts, the yield the next Summer was again smaller and less sweet, and Marilyn and I would skip the pruning for a year in the hopes that the tree would “snap out of it”. Usually it resulted in a poor crop of apricots or worse yet, a branch would become so large and laden with small, worthless, sour fruit that it would fall off.

When I take my time and do it right, and show the tree some tender loving care, I can count on plenty of apricots each Summer. That’s because when it’s done right, new branches are formed, and I can “shape” the tree to produce more and more apricots.

I think today’s Gospel tells us the same thing. We are the branches of the tree of Christ. God “prunes” us based on our actions and deeds as well as what is within our hearts. We must produce fruit. We must not become like the fruit that was on that worthless tree I uprooted. The fruit that we produce is the same fruit that is produced by Christ—namely, keeping His commandments; that we love God above all else and to love one another as He loves us. When we forget that Christ is within us, and share Him with everyone around us, we forget what we were created for, and we become less loving, less caring, and as worthless as those apricots that I could never eat. Or, as St. John said so much better 2000 years ago:

(1 Jn 3:18-24) Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth. Now this is how we shall know that we belong to the truth and reassure our hearts before him in whatever our hearts condemn, for God is greater than our hearts and knows everything. Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence in God and receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. And his commandment is this: we should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another just as he commanded us. Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them, and the way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit he gave us.