John 15:1-8, 5th Sunday of Easter

I’ve always wondered about seedless grapes or seedless watermelons. I mean, they’re convenient and nice, but how do you keep them going? It must be by some biological magic that they keep showing up on our tables. I would think that seedless fruit are like celibates. They’re a dead end as far as reproduction goes unless you can grow the plant that bears the fruit without the seed. In these days of bioengineering, I wouldn’t be surprised if someday they would just short circuit the whole thing and simply grow the fruit without tree or seed.

The Gospel image of today prompts us to reflect and pray over what makes us fruitful, whether we are seedless or not.

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.”

Three things we can ponder from this image of vine and branches. First, we can try to figure out what fruitfulness might mean for us. Second, we can reflect on what or who enables us to bear fruit at all. Third, we can look at the fruit basket to pick the best fruit of them all, which is love.

First, fruitfulness. What does it mean for our lives to be fruit bearing? We can start by naming all the fruits we’ve been working so hard to put on our plate: success, fame and influence, wealth and prosperity, security, happiness, good health, and all kinds of fruity delights. Ano ang bunga ng buhay mo? Sa lahat ng mapipitas sa buhay mo, ano ang masarap at hindi pagsasawaan?

Conversely, we can reflect on barrenness too and what it does to us and to those who matter to us. On this, we need to be careful because fruitfulness is not the same everywhere. The “world” counts fruits differently. (By “world” I mean that patch in this garden opposed to God.) In the eyes of God the vinegrower, the diminishment that comes with pruning need not be fruitless; empty is not always so.  

Of the many fruits then that are on our plate, we can ask which fruit has seeded our lives to greater fruitfulness and which have led us to a barren dead-end. 

Second, what enables us to bear fruit? The Lord’s words are clear: we bear fruit only insofar as we remain in him and he in us. Biology-wise, this suggests staying attached to the vine (i.e. staying close to Christ), which of course makes sense but only prods us further to ask what staying close could mean. 

In John’s letter to us today, to stay close or to remain in Christ is to keep God’s commandments, engraved no longer in stone but in our hearts:

“And his commandment is this: we should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another just as he commanded us.“ 

What keeps us joined to the vine are just these two: faith in Jesus Christ and our love of others. 

Faith we know to be more than just a nod of the head. Belief begins by acknowledging Christ’s vision of who we are in this vineyard: we are branches on the vine, meant to bear fruit not for ourselves alone. Faith is trusting this vision and making it our own. 

Faith alone however is not enough to keep us close to Christ. Our love of others also joins us to Christ. This brings us to our third and last point: the choice fruit that is love.

Of all the fruits we can ever hope to bear, love is the one fruit that never spoils. Christ today reminds us that we cannot bear this fruit on our own. We cannot love unless we remain in God who in Christ is the very essence of love. Love would be unbearable, even if borne mutually by lover and beloved, unless we draw sustenance from the vine that is Christ. Love and its other variants (mercy, patience, kindness) would be impossible if we did not draw close to God who “is greater than our hearts”.

That seems odd since we think we can very well love on our own, thank you. Perhaps if love were only a matter of words and feelings, we could very well wing it. But John’s letter today impresses upon us that love is hard to bear because it is a matter of “deed and truth.” For love to express itself in truth and in action, we will need more than ourselves. When love is in motion and rooted in truth, we join ourselves to Christ.

Beloved, in closing, let us therefore count the fruit of our lives the way God sees fruitfulness in our world. Only as branches joined to the vine can we ever hope to bear fruit. To remain on the vine we only need to believe in Christ and give our love to one another. 

Christ is the vine, we the branches. Imagine that. It does not really matter whether we are seedless or not.