Fifth Sunday of Easter (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, May 1, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter (B), Vigil
May 1, 2021

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday.
• He is going to give us one of his most powerful images, which reveals the type of relationship he wants us to have with him and with others. He also describes for us the means for us to have a truly successful life according to his terms.
• Jesus tells us, “I am the vine. You are the branches.” He and his faithful, he and the Church, exist together as vine and branches. This image of the fruitful union of God and his people was foretold throughout the Old Testament. The prophets often compared Israel to a vine. Isaiah declared, “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel” (Is 5:7). Hosea added, “Israel is a luxuriant vine that yields its fruit” (Hos 10:1). All of this was depicted visually in a stunning golden relief of a vine, with clusters of grapes as big as adults, running around the outside walls of the Temple of Jerusalem. The Church is the fulfillment of this image. The temple stands for God and when the people in faith attach themselves to God, they become a luxuriant vine stretching out its branches and bearing fruit even into the desert. Jesus was probably calling upon his apostles’ obvious knowledge of this golden sculpture as he was describing the image of the Vine and Branches on Holy Thursday evening, because they likely would have seen the gilded vine as they visited the temple earlier in the day. The problem, we know from our knowledge of Sacred Scripture, is that Israel as a whole didn’t stay attached to God in this way. God asked through Isaiah, “What more was there to do my for my vineyard that I had not done? Why, when I looked for the crop of grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes.” It didn’t bear good fruit, because it had detached itself from God through sin. Jesus mentioned this in one of his parables, when he said the Vineyard owner sent multiples waves of servants, and finally his Son, to collect his share of grapes at harvest time, but the tenants of the vineyard manhandled the servants and killed the Son. This was referring to salvation history and to the way Israel treated the prophets God sent to them and treated even Jesus himself. God looked to Israel to bear good fruit — which are deeds of love in union with God — but so often the harvest that was yielded was the wild fruit of a wild life, rejecting God’s prophets, God’s word, God’s love, God’s son.
• That’s why Jesus says at the beginning of this Sunday’s passage: “I am the true vine.” By doing so, he contrasted himself with the unfaithfulness of those who had failed to produce the harvest of love God wants in the world. He had come to replant the vine, to become the new temple, to make possible our bearing good fruit. And in the great mystery of salvation history, God makes the fruit he bears dependent on our being fruitful branches. A vine can’t bear fruit without branches. The stem bears only branches, but it’s the branches that bear fruit. For God to bear his fruit in the world, in other words, he has chosen to depend on us, that we remain attached to him and bear good fruit. Otherwise the great gift of his salvation, his love, won’t be seen in the world, people won’t be saved, the sap of his love will be wasted. Jesus wants to bear fruit in you and me. He wants his love to flow through you and me and through the Church. He wants us to bear not wild grapes that are good for nothing, but fruit that will last to eternal life. The Church exists as branches on Christ the Vine precisely to bear this abundant harvest of the fruit of love.
• For that to occur, Jesus says, we must abide in him. Whether we bear good fruit or not totally depends on whether we remain in him or not, whether we live in loving union with him. “Abide in me,” he tells us, “as I abide in you.  Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in me.” To abide in him is far more than a wish to be in communion with him. It has many practical consequences that we see elsewhere in the Gospel. We can focus briefly on five things we need to do truly to abide in Jesus.
  • First, to abide in him, we must keep His Commandments. He tells us in the continuation of Sunday’s Gospel passage, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love” (Jn 15:10). The commandments train us to love God and love others, and we can’t be abiding in God unless we love him and try to love others as he has loved us first.
  • Second, to abide in Jesus, we must listen to his word. He tells us, “If you remain in me and my words remain in you…” We must be people who abide in the Word of God, who let what God has said echo within us. We must act on what Jesus said to the devil, “Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4). We must live by the principle St. Peter and the apostles lived by: “Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn 6:68). If we don’t know the word of God, if our Bibles just take up space on our bookshelves, if we don’t seek to become living commentaries on what God has taught us, then we will bear little fruit. That’s why it’s so great millions of Catholics are listening to The Bible in a Year Podcast with Fr. Mike Schmitz or otherwise trying to grow in their knowledge, love and living of Sacred Scripture. That brings us to the third point.
  • To abide in Jesus, we must be pruned by God the Father through the Word of God. Jesus says that the Father “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.” The Word of God helps us to cut off from our lives whatever won’t bear fruit in God. It helps us to set our priorities straight. It helps us, for example, to cut out all the time we waste watching television or in other distractions, so that we use our gift of time, not for selfish pursuits, not for worthless diversions, but for God and in love of others. Many times we can do that type of pruning ourselves, so that our energies can go exclusively into bearing fruit. But sometimes, when we don’t do so, God the Father may out of love prune us himself, taking away certain things that we might desire so that we may begin to grow in the way God really wants us to grow. To abide in Jesus means to give God permission to do this pruning and to pray about how he wants us to be pruned, every day, beginning now.
  • Fourth, to abide in him, we must spread the faith. St. John writes in his first letter, “God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God.” (1John 4:15). If God really abides in us and we in him, then we can’t help but spread love of him, as naturally as a good apple tree bears good apples. We can’t keep to ourselves the joy of living the faith, the happiness that comes from having Christ live within. We must share the faith.
  • Lastly, to abide in him, we must live a truly Eucharistic life. Jesus told us in his famous Bread of Life discourse in St. John’s Gospel, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (Jn 6:56). That begins with hungering for Jesus in Holy Communion and receiving him worthily. It involves wanting a loving communion with others. And it flourishes in wanting to bear fruit and “do this in memory of him,” to give our body and blood out of love for him and others.”
• The Mass is the living summary of this Gospel of the vine and the branches. In it, we consecrate the “fruit of the vine,” the “true vine,” Jesus himself, squeezed out during his Passion on the Cross, but we also consecrate the “work of human hands,” who are the branches. God the Father returns this to us as our “spiritual drink” that we offer to him under the appearance of wine. In the Eucharist, the fruit that we give with Christ, the fruit of the vine and the branches, reaches its climax. If we live this Eucharist, if we keep this communion with the Lord, if we live this loving union, that we will bear fruit that will last until eternal life.
• God bless you!

The following text guided the homily: 

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