Remaining Fruitful Branches of Christ the Vine, Fifth Sunday of Easter (B), April 28, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year B
April 28, 2024
Acts 9:26-31, Ps 22, 1 John 3:18-24, John 15:1-8

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• I had the joy of being trained for the priesthood at the North American College in Rome. The chapel where we’d convene to pray twice a day was rich in art and symbolism. Behind the altar was an enormous, exquisite mosaic of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, to whom the Chapel as well as the United States is dedicated. There is an evocative Stations of the Cross made by Francesco Messina, the most famous Italian bronze sculptor of the twentieth century. The sanctuary features beautiful murals of the Joyful Mysteries of the Holy Rosary as well as scenes of Christ’s own priestly ministry. It has bas reliefs of the “eight” sacraments, with the eighth one being “preaching,” by which the words of Christ are made actual and efficacious in the lives of believers. It has an organ that once was the greatest in Rome. But while the eyes of most first-time visitors to the Chapel heads look up and around with wonder, the most important symbolic imagery of all remains at their feet. When I used to give tours of the chapel to visitors, I would ask them to look on what they’re standing to see if they can figure out what message it is sending. They think, at first, it’s a trick question, because all they see is polished marble, some dark (reddish purple, I was told — I’m color blind) and some off-white. They notice that it seems to fall into an interweaving pattern throughout the main body of the chapel where the pews are, and then they see that the sanctuary, where the altar is located and all the priests concelebrate, is totally in dark marble. After several guesses, most would give up. I would give them the hint, “Think about John 15,” and that’s when the more Biblically literate would speak up and say, “It’s supposed to be the Vine and the Branches.” The floor of the North American College is meant to illustrate what the Church is and how the Church bears fruit. Everything starts from Christ in the sanctuary, from his gift of himself of his body and blood. But then it flows from Christ, the head of the Church, into his entire Mystical Body. And when we abide in him, then we are able to bear much fruit in the world together with him. That’s the source of the North American College’s vitality. That’s the source of any seminary’s vitality. That’s the sole source of the Church’s fruitfulness.
• As Jesus tells us today in the Gospel, 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. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, the prophets compared Israel to a vine. Psalm 80 said, “You brought a vine out of Egypt, driving away the nations and planting it. You cleared the ground; it took root and filled the land. The mountains were covered by its shadow, the cedars of God by its branches. It sent out boughs as far as the sea, shoots as far as the river” (Ps 80: 9-12). 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 attach themselves with faith to God, they become a luxuriant vine stretching out 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. Even though, as Isaiah said, God had “spaded [the vineyard of Israel], cleared it of stones and planted the choicest vines,” even though he had “within it built a watchtower and hewed out a wine press, … he looked for the crop of grapes, but all it yielded was wild grapes.” God asked, “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?” He looked for it to yield good fruit, but what it yielded was wild and bitter (Is 5:2). It didn’t bear good fruit, because it had detached itself from God through sin. Jesus pointed this out in one of his strongest parables, in which, after using the very images Isaiah described, he said that he sent servants to the tenants to whom he had leased this rich vineyard to bring to him a portion of the crop, but they took and beat servants, sending them back empty-handed, then they wounded and treated another shamefully, and killed a third emissary. Finally, he sent his Son to them, but they murdered him, too, in order to try to steal the inheritance (Mk 12:1-11). This was referring to salvation history and to the way Israel as a whole treated the prophets God sent to them and treated even Jesus himself. God looked to his people to bear good fruit — which are deeds of love in union with God — but the only harvest that was yielded was the wild fruit of a sinful life, rejecting God himself through rejecting his prophets, his word, his love, even his only begotten Son.
• Jesus says at the beginning of the Gospel today, “I am the true vine.” By doing so, he was contrasting 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 today’s Gospel and salvation history, God makes the fruit he bears dependent on our being fruitful branches. A vine, we know, 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 depends on us to remain attached to him and to bear good fruit. Otherwise, the great gift of God’s salvation, God’s 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. Jesus had said elsewhere, “Every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit” (Mt 7:17-19). The key for us is not to worry so much about the fruit as to worry about remaining attached to Jesus the True Vine and Good Tree. In today’s Gospel points to how we will bear fruit through remaining attached to him. “Abide in me, 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.”  When we do, he promises us, then we will bear not just a little fruit, but “much fruit.” Just think about the saints, like St. Teresa of Calcutta, like St. Gianna Molla, St. Peter Chanel, St. Louis de Montfort whom the Church remembers on April 28, all of whom bore great fruit not because of human talents but because they gave God permission. Look at the early Church, as we do every Easter season, and how much fruit a bunch of fisherman, tax collectors and relative nobodies bore because they were united to God so that he could work through them. As the Acts of the Apostles tells us today in the first reading, the Church continued to grow throughout Judea, Galilee, Samaria, even Antioch, because the Holy Spirit was uniting them to God and they were yielding a great harvest. At the end of the Gospel today, Jesus says that we become his disciples only when we bear much fruit to the Father’s glory. We become disciples not by merely being baptized, not merely by coming to Mass, not just by not committing serious sins, but by bearing fruit — indeed, “much” fruit. He has given us this vocation to bear fruit, saying to us later on in this same chapter of the Gospel, “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will last.”
• To bear fruit, Jesus tells us, we must abide in him. 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 today’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). St. John’s in today’s epistle said, “All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them” (1 John 3:24). The fourth evangelist also cautions us today against thinking we are abiding in Jesus when we really aren’t. “Whoever says, “I abide in him,” ought to walk just as he walked.”
    • To walk as Jesus walked, to put the faith into action as he did, means to follow him on the path of self-sacrificial love. That’s why, later on in this Chapter of the Vine and the Branches, Jesus says to us, “Love one another as I have loved you.” We will not remain in the Vine unless we’re loving, and loving means not just having nice, sympathetic feelings for others, but sacrificing ourselves for them. St. John tells us today, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action” (1 John 3:17). He tells us, “By this we know love,” that just as “Jesus laid down his life for us, we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” (1 John 3:15). He adds later in his first letter, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). We can’t love God unless we’re keeping his commandment to love one another just as he loved us, unless, therefore, we’re sacrificing for others and forgiving others. As the Servant of God Dorothy Day, a fruitful branch of Christ’s vine here in New York, once said, “We love the Lord to the extent that we love the person we like the least.” If we’re stingy following Jesus’ command to love others as he has loved us, if we try to ignore those in need or just give the minimum so that we can keep a certain human respect, it could very well be a sign of how little we are abiding in the Lord and in his love, and why we might be bearing little fruit, no fruit, or bad fruit.
  • Second, to abide in Jesus, we must listen to his word.
    • “Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you,” St. John tells us. “If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you will abide in the Son and in the Father” (1 John 2:24). We must be men and women, boys and girls, who abide in the Word of God, who let what God has said to us from the beginning 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 by which St. Peter and the apostles lived: “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 leads 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 assists us, for example, to cut out all the time we waste in various 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. Often we can do the pruning ourselves, through good resolutions flowing from our prayer or our retreats, 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 relationships or things, often even good relationships and things, 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.
    • John writes, “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 become like the early Church, which St. Luke tells us in the first reading “with the consolation of the Holy Spirit grew in numbers.”
  • 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). In Holy Communion Jesus comes to abide in us like he for nine months at the beginning of his earthly life abided in Mary. But we’re called to abide in him. This abiding begins even before we receive him, through hungering to receive him in Holy Communion. The abiding continues through striving to unite all our life to him and through remaining in a loving communion with all others in holy communion with him. 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. The whole world is a continuation of the Chapel of the North American College, beginning with Christ in the sanctuary and stretching out into the pews, and from the pews, into the living branches that stretch forth its boughs to the rivers, seas, mountains, street corners, homes, schools, workplaces, sports fields, soup kitchens and more.  We consecrate here the “fruit of the vine,” the true vine squeezed out during the Passion of the Lord on the Cross, but we also consecrate the “work of human hands,” the work of us 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, then, Jesus promises, we will bear fruit that will last unto eternal life.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

The church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria was at peace.
It was being built up and walked in the fear of the Lord,
and with the consolation of the Holy Spirit it grew in numbers.

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