Connected in Christ

 

“I am the vine; you are the branches.”  (John 15:5).  Along with Paul’s image of the church as the body of the risen Christ (1 Corinthians 12:14), this image of the Church as grapevine spoken by Jesus in John’s Gospel is one of the great images of the unity of the living Church.  The body analogy is a rich analogy for celebrating the unity that comes from the collaboration of diverse members that utterly depend both on one another and on their common head for life, survival, and direction.  The power of the vine-and-branches image comes from the way it illustrates and emphasizes the complete dependence of the life of each member on the head, Christ, for its vitality and fruitfulness, and how each member flourishes under the care coming from yet another distinct source, the Father.

The painful discipline of fruitful spiritual growth is caught in the detail of the Father’s pruning.  Observed apart from the context of the life of the branch, the act of pruning seems at first to be a violation of the branch; something is cut off, after all—amputated.  But the full context reveals that the loss of a random sprout results in a branch that delivers more nourishing fluid to the eventual budding and production of the cluster of grapes.  And that wonderful process requires that the branch maintain its connection with the nurturing vine. The fruitfulness of all the branches depends on their union with the one vine--the risen Christ (John 15:1-8).  The teaching power of the vine and branches image might be the reason it appears so frequently in Christian art.

St. Luke, the author of Acts, tells how the church in Antioch was divided by different responses to a thorny problem, namely, the question of whether Gentiles needed to take on the Jewish way of life (especially circumcision) if they accepted the (Jewish) Messiah and joined the (mainly Jewish, at that time) Church.  The disciples’ first response to division was to seek unity, to gather with the elders and Apostles in Jerusalem to seek a solution.  They knew that they were meant to be an organic whole, one body in Christ.  Their lives were driven by the faith conviction that they were to do everything they could to enable the Holy Spirit achieve unity even when they were divided over a policy issue (Acts 15:1-6).

To a lot of people these days, we’re a Church divided in many ways, just as we were in the first days of Christianity.  The scriptures I reflected on today reminds us to imitate the spirit of the early Church as Luke narrates it in the calling of the first council of the Church.  Luke’s portrait of the decision-making process of the early church—reflecting on experience in the light of the longer tradition—remains a model for us today.