Prune away, Lord!

My good and faithful apricot tree before we uprooted it

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.”

My reflection on the gospel of John (15: 1-8) today brought back memories of my apricot trees that Marilyn and I planted in our back yard a few weeks after we bought our house.  We love apricots, so we planted two.  We were told by the nurseryman that we should plant two trees so that they would “cross-pollinate” and thereby create a better yield.  In a sense, he was right; the trees produced fruit every single year. The only problem was that only one of the trees produced ‘good’ fruit.  The other produced fruit, but the apricots were never any larger than a large walnut, and the flavor was bitter. The apricots on that tree never saw maturity.  We gave it 2 or 3 years to see if it would come around, but all it ever produced was a mess of leaves and green fruit I would have to rake up before mowing the lawn; eventually, we uprooted it from the yard so we could expand our garage. 

The first year without its “sister”, the productive tree still produced fruit, but it looked a lot smaller than in the previous years.  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 (the branch) would fall off.

When I took my time to do it right, and showed the tree some tender loving care, I could count on plenty of apricots each Summer. That’s because when it was done right, new branches were formed, and I could “shape” the tree to produce more and more apricots (thanks to some self-help books).  Sadly, the tree finally became so old that it wouldn’t or couldn’t produce fruit anymore, so we uprooted it, as well.  But we have planted a new tree in its place.  I can only hope it’s as fruitful.  Time and proper pruning will tell.

Getting back to the gospel; Jesus Christ is like that apricot tree, and we are His branches.  God “prunes” us based on our actions and deeds as well as what’s within our hearts.  He wants us to produce good fruit.  We must not bear fruit like that which was on that worthless tree I uprooted.  The fruit that we produce must be 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.  I think St. John said it best: “Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth….  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.”  (1 Jn 3:18-24)