The Vine and the Branches

“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in Me.”—John xv. 4.

The passage: Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it stays in the vine, neither can you unless you stay in me.

When each of us asks in Lent, “What have I most to confess? What has been my great misdoing?”, no distinct answer comes. There is a vague sense of duties left undone and tempers indulged. There is a sense of devotion and fretfulness over little things while serious work went on that we should have cared about, or else of indifference to little acts of self-denial and little habits of evil, out of ambition to do something fine. As I said last Sunday, we may find ourselves guilty of various offences against the law of charity, which this season sets out as the law of our lives. But what we probably condemn ourselves for most is not any direct outrage against that law. It is a kind of uselessness, lifelessness, barrenness. We cannot stir ourselves to any course of action, scarcely to one deliberate act. We seem left with an endless routine, or with floating along a stream without knowing where it leads. In church and in private prayer, have you not often felt that you were only going through prescribed rules, not gaining strength to face the world but yielding to one of its fashions?

There is a dull, dead pain in these feelings, and many would gladly exchange it for the sharp pain of those awakened to some great sin. We try to lull it with drugs, since we are sure we ought to be free of it, though it does not seem to need severe treatment. We hope it does not mean inward disease, and half fear it does. So we hide the symptoms from ourselves, and in time may think they do not exist. This is not an honest course, brethren, and so it cannot be a wise one. There is comfort as well as terror in St. John’s words: “If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” Every reproof of conscience, whether a sudden twinge or a pain repeated day after day, is the work of God’s Spirit, convincing us of sin so that He may convince us of righteousness. If we believe these messages are from Him, we must know they come from a loving Friend who grieves for us and with us, who wants to set us right and can make us what He would have us be.

Here, in my text, is the lesson that Spirit is teaching. He explains the secret of our inability to believe, hope, love, and act freely, calmly and manfully. He discloses both the cause and the remedy. “As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me”: there is the source of the malady. “Abide in me, and I in you”: there is the cure. Let us consider each in turn.

I. Our Lord says to His disciples, “I am the Vine; ye are the Branches.” We call this a comparison or a parable, and so it is. But do we not mean by this that it does not strictly express the truth, that the truth differs from what the illustration suggests? I am sure this thought lurks in our minds and robs us of more good than we know. We suppose a likeness is a clever device for telling us something about a thing or person, not an actual presentation of it. So we set about translating the illustration into some more exact abstract speech. But I assume that our Lord knew what was in the being whose nature He had taken, and in Him from whom He came, and knew how to declare what He was sent to declare. So when He said at the last supper, “I am the Vine; ye are the Branches,” I suppose He meant them to look at an actual vine and its branches, whether or not one was before their eyes on the walk to the Mount of Olives. By a law given at creation, every branch is related to every other and to the root, and receives all its life from the root. I suppose He also meant them to understand that by a law as old as that, they were as really related to each other, because they were as really related to Him. A branch cannot be severed from the others without losing its life, and neither can a man be severed from his fellow, except at the same cost. The reason is the same: losing the relation between the branches is losing the relation to the root, and losing the relation between a man and his brother is losing the relation between that man and Christ.

This gathered into one utterance all that had been scattered through our Lord’s parables and discourses. His acts of service and grace, and all His sympathies with men, had implied such a relation. So had the stories of the Shepherd and the Sheep, and of the Husbandman and the Labourers. But something was needed to show that these relations were not arbitrary or accidental, and did not depend on men’s good pleasure. There needed to be a natural emblem saying, “So it must be; no determination or self-will can make it otherwise.” The Scribes and Pharisees had rejected Jesus as the Christ. Did that mean only that they refused certain evidences that He was the Person the Prophets spoke of? It was more, because the Prophets had spoken of a Root from which the whole life of the Nation, and of every man in it, was derived. The Person said to fulfil their words gave proofs, addressed to the consciences of His countrymen, that He was this root. The Scribes and Pharisees were resisting that witness in their consciences and trying to exist apart from the root. If so, it would be proved as our Lord had foretold: the dissolution of the Nation that had severed itself from its root would show it had no life of its own. And each man, of that Nation or any other, who confessed Christ as his root would discover how he was related to his fellows, and would show by his fruits that a true life was working in him.

This was the lesson the Disciples were to learn at the Paschal Supper, after His ministry to the Jews as a Nation was over. They might easily fancy they were gathered round a leader of their own choosing, to whom they would stay faithful whoever else deserted Him. They were to learn it was not so. They had not chosen Jesus, and they could not keep their allegiance to Him. One would betray Him, one would deny Him, and all would forsake Him. But He had chosen them, and brought them about Him so that they might know the secret of their union with Him and with each other. He was the only source, bond and upholder of that union. His choice was not arbitrary either; in making it He was fulfilling a commandment. They were as truly united to Him as the branch to the vine. They could do what branches cannot do: deliberately say, “We renounce our connection with the root; we will not abide in it.” But they could not make Him not their root, and by that very act they would prove He was, since the withering of all life in them would be the demonstration.

This was also the secret of their union with each other. They would care for each other as members of one family only so far as they remembered that the Chief of all had become the servant of all, and that the Master had washed His disciples’ feet to show they belonged to Him and that He had given Himself for them. And this was to be the subject of their Gospel to the Nations. They were to say: “We bring you news of the divine root from which all life has come, does come, and will come into the Universe. We see you joined in separate communities, each worshipping this power of Nature or that good or evil quality. We declare to you Him from whom all Nature derives its forms and forces, the Lord of Air and Sea and Earth. We declare to you Him from whom all the gifts and graces of all men proceed, in whom they are gathered up, and from whom alone anyone has received them. We call you to acknowledge Him and claim your place in Him: to be rooted and grounded in Him, to grow up into Him in all things, to refer all your abilities to Him and seek from Him the grace to use them, and to regard them as channels through which His Spirit acts.” This was their doctrine. It was the meaning of the ordinances by which they grafted into the Church those who received their preaching as God’s word and not man’s. Baptism, prayer and the Communion of the Lord’s Supper all expressed it. All these ordinances would be empty forms if what Christ said that night were not true: true for them, for all to whom He would send them, and for all men everywhere. They were living realities if Christ really was the Vine, and if it is men’s sin and misery to separate themselves from that Vine, since they were created to be its branches and so to bear fruit to God.

II. So they taught, and so our fathers believed. Otherwise no Church would have been set up in this land or done anything to enlighten and civilize the world around. And we all profess to believe it too; our Creeds, Worship and Sacraments testify to it as much as the earliest Christians’ did. The secret of their becoming dull routine, of our daily existence becoming a pretence, and of our inward barrenness and incapacity to act or find reasons for action, is simply this: we do not believe these words of Christ. They do not come to us as the revelation of a living truth that cannot pass away though heaven and earth may. We suppose we must attach ourselves to Christ by some acts or arts of our own. We do not simply confess that His Father has attached us to Him by His own purpose and love, created, redeemed and constituted us in Him, so that we may do the works He wants done, which His Spirit is working in us to do by all His gentlest and severest discipline. Let this be our great Lent confession, the beginning and end of all our confessions. The Spirit convinces us of sin because we believe not in Him. He shows our failures, weaknesses and corruptions as flowing from this source: we have acted as if we were not rooted in Him, as if we could persuade, train or task our selfish, corrupt Adam nature into producing something good for men or pleasing to God. Let us resolve, once for all, that this is impossible. A corrupt tree cannot bear good fruit; this is a law proclaimed by Him who spoke with authority, and it can never be repealed. No skill, discipline, refinement or religion can compel what is base and selfish to create what is manly, pure and self-sacrificing. Men have tried it for six thousand years, calling in politics, philosophy and religious societies, and have failed. Where, then, has there been success? Wherever a body of men, or one man, has said resolutely: God has not left us to our selfish tendencies; He has grafted us into the true human and divine root; He wants us to abide in it and is willing to renew us day by day in Him in whom He regenerated us. He has said, “Abide in me, and I in you,” and in His commandment is life; He does not break His promises as we break ours. Whoever has taken this as the principle of his acts, and trusted himself wholly to God’s working in him, has been enabled to overcome the world, the flesh and the Devil and walk according to God’s will. And when a nation or a Church finds it has gone far wrong, become worldly, lukewarm and uncharitable, each seeking his own and not the things of Jesus Christ, so that confusion, discontent and evil spread through a land on which God has poured out His goodness, there is one way of reformation. It is to recall the lore of our childhood and return to the old faith that we are members of Christ and God’s children. It is to confess how little we have understood or cared for that privilege, or cared to tell everyone we influence, in the furthest ends of the earth, that it is theirs as well as ours.

These words, brethren, must be our watchword and charm in the time to come: “Abide in me, and I in you.” Let us receive them not as read out of a book, but as truly spoken to us by Christ as He spoke them to the eleven on the night of His betrayal and agony. Let us be sure that each morning He says, “Abide in me this day, and I will abide in you,” and says it again as we lie down at night. Then day after day and night after night, by all their sad and joyful experiences, will repeat and confirm it. The more sorely we are tempted by vanity, self-glorification, lust, indolence or cowardice, the more certain we shall be that these are messages of the Evil Spirit to draw us from the Lord who has bound us to Himself, and that greater is He that is with us than they that are against us. The more dreary the world looks, and the more we feel our weakness to renew it, the more confident we shall be that He does the help that is done upon the earth, that He who died for Mankind cares for man more than we can, and that our highest ambition must be to be His ministers in some little sphere, fulfilling His ends and not ours. If we care for that honour, He has told us He is willing to give it: it is His Father’s pleasure that we bear much fruit, and He came to do that pleasure and to give us power to do it. While you simply resolve to live as if you were His and He in you, every lowly duty in your family, every effort to be useful in your neighbourhood, every body and soul you comfort will be a new bond to Christ and a new pledge of His presence. Then all things will be transformed. In the service of the Nation there will be manly purposes, clear insight and the sacrifice of petty ends. Power will be seen as a trust, received thankfully and discharged in fear and hope, not as a prize to covet. The Church will care to be nothing but the witness for Him who took the nature of all so as to give life to all who would receive it from Him. Whenever we feel heartburnings, jealousies, suspicions, quarrels for precedence, a desire to exalt our opinions or put down our opponents, we shall know inwardly that we are not abiding in Christ. We shall confess that sin, and ask the Father who grafted us into His Son to give us repentance so that we turn and cleave to Him. We shall ask for His Spirit, that our grudging, thankless, complaining life may change into a free, manly life that grows stronger for the discomforts that threaten it. Then, instead of asking what we shall get for serving God, the highest blessing will seem to be the power to serve Him, because exercising it always demands more trust in Him and more knowledge of what He is. Rewards beyond what we in our slothful life can dream of are for those who have watched beside hospital beds and worn themselves out encouraging the sick and dying, by deeds more than words, to abide in Him who died for them. The peace they give returns to them. They know that He in whom they believed is not their Lord only but the Lord of the whole earth. They feel more each day their own impotence and the evil fighting against them and the world, so they must think less of themselves and cast every burden on God, trusting Him to accomplish His own will. Then, when the powers spent on their brethren grow feeble, when eye, hand and heart fail, God will surely make all their bed in their sickness. The lesson of a whole life of toil and self-sacrifice will be gathered up in the days that call forth endurance, a higher and more blessed sacrifice still. The evening hour will be a Paschal supper, and He who sits at it, breaking the bread and pouring the wine, will say to His faithful disciple, as His last and best words: “Abide in me and I will abide in thee; yea, through long ages I will cause thee to bear fruit for the good of the family on earth and the glory of the Father in Heaven.”

So the thought of such people’s deeds, which has more often discouraged us by contrast with our own than cheered us to follow, will have its right effect. We cannot gain strength from them, but we shall know where theirs was gained: it was received in weakness and perfected in weakness. When they learned to despair of themselves and to abide in One who suffered for all and gives life to all, they became able to suffer with their fellows and bring them life. If the disciples cannot cast the dumb and deaf spirit out of us, the Master can. If we cannot renew our youth at the spring, we can at the fountain. The sense of weakness and sin drives us from all intermediate creatures to the Mediator between the God of Love and us who have wandered from that Love. In discovering Him, we discover again our relation to all creatures. We can go on receiving blessings from them and imparting blessings to them, because He has said, “Abide in me and I will abide in you.”