5th SUNDAY OF EASTER (B)

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. 

Jn 15:1-8

v. 1. “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower.”

The Old Testament characteristically gives an historical interpretation to the figure of Israel as the vine of God's planting. In later Judaism it became possible to give a mystical interpretation of the metaphor. The appearance of the story of the vineyard in Mark I2:1-9 suggests that it is right to continue an historical interpretation here in John.

My Father is the vine grower:

He has in his care both the vine itself (Jesus) and the branches (the disciples). The metaphor well sets out the intimacy of the relationship between Christ and his disciples. It must not be counted against it that it cannot, in the nature of things, depict as forcefully the intimacy of the relationship between Father and Son as between them and the disciples.

v. 2. He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and everyone that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit.

Every branch in me that does not bear fruit:

This can be taken to make a primary reference to the Jews as the first unfruitful branch to be cut off. This would be a parallel thought to that of Romans 11:17,  where the rejection of the Jews is brought into Paul's attempt at a theodicy. Cf. also Mt. 15:13 and 21:41. But it seems more evident, in view of the words “in me”, that the first thought was of apostate Christians.

He takes away ... he prunes:

There is a punning sequence in these two verbs, suggesting that the two operations are not decisively different. Both are certainly meant to serve the same end - the rich fruiting of the vine.

v. 3. You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you.

The mention of “pruning” (=cleansing) was probably intended to recall the “cleansing” offered to and accepted by the disciples at the supper when Jesus washed their feet. And though the statement here refers to a “word”, that could well be the case; for the mere act of washing, as was noted, is in itself inoperative. Word and deed form a unity, and their final togetherness is in the actual crucifixion and resurrection of the Lord. And the proclamation of both manifests them as the salvation of God.

v. 4. Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me.

Remain in me, as I remain in you:

The meaning is that of seeking unceasing loyalty from the disciple.

v. 6. Anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither; people will gather them and throw them into a fire and they will be burned.

Here the movement of metaphor is not an immediate help to clarity. But the disciple who ceases to “remain in Christ” is in the position of the branch that is no longer on the vine stock. The branch is no longer a branch but just a piece of wood. And it is treated properly as a piece of wood when it is cast on to the fire. There is no implication of eternal fires of judgment in the verse. A disciple remains a truly human person only as he accepts Christ and remains in him.

REFLECTION

 When the Psalmist sang (Psalm 80:9): “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out nations and planted it” even the most unpoetic of persons would have known that the “real vine” of the song was not a horticultural plant that chanced to be removed in some way from Egypt to Palestine, but was rather the people of Israel, whom God had delivered from oppression by the hand of Moses, and had brought them to some security of a new home in the land of Palestine. Yet, as the Psalmist himself and many a prophet knew and testified, Israel had been a “fruitless” vine. The baptism which John had offered his contemporaries was an open acknowledgement of the fact that Israel had not been a “true” Israel or people of God; that she had failed to produce in the world the fruits which God sought of her.

“I am the true [the real] vine” (v. 1). The life of God-with-man, which is the real essence of Israel's proper existence, has now begun. The true, the real vine has been planted. Like all vines, it will have branches, and like all vines, it will need attention. It will need dressing and pruning, and useless branches will have to be cut away and destroyed. But the vine will continue to bear fruit. The relationship of vine and branch conveys to the disciples a real sense of the profound intimacy of thei relationship to Jesus Christ. Just as a hand is not a hand unless it be joined to an arm of a lving body, and cannot do the work of a hand unless it is so joined, so a vine branch is not branch unless it is joined to the vine stock, and it cannot bear grapes unless it is so joined. Jesus had already spoken of the intimacy of the disciples being in him and he in them: the figure of the vine is a happy illustration of that intimacy.

4th SUNDAY OF EASTER (B)

I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me. 

Jn 10: 11-18

v. 11. I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

The 'good', rather than the normal Johannine 'genuine' or 'real' shepherd, because Jesus does not contrast so much in reality of his rule, but in its character and quality. Others may 'lord it' over men as they govern; he has come to minister and do the office of a servant (cf. the feet-washing of ch. 13).

v. 12. A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own, sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf catches and scatters them.

Hired man is now mentioned for the first time, though it discloses the depth of the difference between Jesus as a shepherd who owns his sheep, and cares for them, and will protect them as he will his own life and those who have no such ties of ownership or care for those they govern, and who are thus moved by motives of reward.

vv. 14-15. I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I will lay down my life for the sheep.

These verses set out again the parallel between the relation between Jesus and his disciples and that between Jesus and the Father. Mutual knowledge and love, and a life-giving care are the marks of that relationship.

v. 17. This is why the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.

“This is why the Father loves me.” It is not to be supposed that the Father only began to love the Son when he had offered himself upon the cross. Rather the evangelist is saying that the Father's eternal love for the Son rests upon the Son's eternal sharing of the Father's love for men. This finds expression in the incarnation, and in the self-offering of the cross.

v. 18. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again. This command I have received from my Father.

The claim to be able to lay down life and to take it again must not be disconnected either from what precedes, or from what follows. What precedes is the series of affirmations that Jesus is the good shepherd (ruler), that he lays down his life for the sheep, and that the Father loves him because he lays down his life that he might take it again. What follows is the assertion that to lay down his life and take it again has been received as a charge from the Father. This therefore cannot mean that laying down life is made easy or terrorless. The Father loves the Son because in obedience he will lay down his life - the only way by which it may be eventually retained. He must resign his crown to secure it. And that laying down, the resignation, must take place while the Word is in the flesh.

REFLECTION

We are not to think of Jesus as a shepherd who is the true ruler of his people and who happens to lay down his life for his sheep, but rather as the true ruler of God’s people only in that and because he lays down his life for the sheep. 

His sacrifice is part of his office, and his reign in part consists in his self-offering for those he governs. Those who are able to trace the story of Hebrew religion the way in which the people of Israel had been able (or been enabled) to transmute the surrounding pagan new year rituals of the dying and rising of the king into their own rigorously spiritual worship can detect here the final fulfillment of the human conception of a divine king who dies for the life of his people. 

Those who remember the language of Second Isaiah concerning the 'servant' whose life is offered as a 'ransom for many" (Is 53:10-12) will catch the overtones of reference to one who although and because he is the one true ruler or shepherd of God's people is yet the servant of all; and as the servant will, like the suffering servant hymned in Isaiah 53, suffer to liberate his people and give his life for the sins of many.

Here is the crown and the highest fulfillment of ‘authority’ and ‘rule’ - that the one who governs should be the one who sacrifices his life.

The flock of Christ does not consist simply of those who are called out of the fold of Israel, but includes sheep not of that fold, whom Christ must bring, and make into one flock with those called out of Israel under his one shepherding. Such a figure is the very concise Johannine parallel to the Pauline exposition in Romans 9-11 of the way in which God elected Israel-after-the- flesh to be his people, only to have them reject the Messiah when he came, thereby bringing about the gathering in of the Gentiles. In this way their accession to the body of God's people—both Jews and Gentiles—should be fully brought into one. “So there shall be one flock, one shepherd” might well serve as a text for those three chapters in Romans which some have thought to be a sermon on the theme of the unity of God's purpose in history. The Good Shepherd is the savior of the world.

Finally, the evangelist makes it unmistakably plain that for the Good Shepherd to lay down his life for the sheep is not art inescapable submission to some power or authority that is out of control in God's universe, but a voluntary self-offering in loving fulfillment of the Father's will, in order that the life laid down might be taken up again in a new fullness and victory. 

The story of the 'passion' in John is not an account what men did to Jesus, but rather the story of what he did for them. Paradoxically it can be put in the form that where he was most passive (in yielding himself up to death) there he was most active (in bringing eternal life).That Jesus himself initiated the particular chain of event that resulted in his hanging on a cross the readers of the gospel could learn from any one of the synoptic. John makes it clear that not only at the moment of the initiation of these events, but all the way through, even when he hung upon the cress, Jesus was active and in complete control. 

John would not deny the witness of the synoptics and the writer of Acts that Jesus was crucified according to the determined purpose of God. He would hardly contest a claim that the cross was for Jesus an inescapable destiny. But he is even more concerned himself to witness to the truth that all through the events of the passion, crucifixion and death of Jesus, the true agent, the true actor remained Jesus himself His active will turned what might otherwise be a blind fate or an ineluctable destiny into a self-offering and a self-sacrifice. And it all finds its origin and its enactment in the love of the Father for the world which the Son, sharing the Father's love, came to save. Such a figure, such a person is the one who claims to be the Good Shepherd.

3RD SUNDAY OF EASTER (B)

And that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.

Lk 24:35-48

The last episode of Luke's Gospel has a close resemblance to John 20:19-29, and in some manuscripts Luke's account has been amplified by interpolation from John. Both narratives agree that Jesus appeared in a bodily form not subject to ordinary, physical restrictions, but both are at pains to emphasize its solidly corporeal nature. 

There are four possible motives for this emphasis.

• For Luke the foremost reason was fidelity to his sources, for he had inherited from the Aramaic-speaking Church a tradition which spoke of Jesus eating and drinking with his disciples after he had risen (Acts 10:36-43).
• Underlying this tradition was the characteristic cast of the semitic mind. Whereas the Greeks tended to think of reality in terms of abstractions and universal truths, to the Jews reality was always particular and concrete, and it was inevitable that this concreteness should find expression in materialistic imagery. Thus the highly material splendors of the heavenly city in the Revelation are symbolic assurance that heaven is utterly real, a pIace not of rarefied spirituality but of “solid joys”. This means that to a Jew a disembodied spirit could only seem a ghost, not a living being, but a thin, unsubstantial carbon-copy which had somehow escaped from the dungeon of death.
• And since the authorities would certainly attempt to explain away the claims of the disciples by arguing that they had seen a ghost, an apologetic motive may be discerned behind Luke's story.
• Finally, we know that towards the end of the first century there grew up in the Church a: heresy called Docetism, which denied the reality of Christ's human life and asserted that the divine Christ descended upon the human Jesus at his baptism and withdrew again before his crucifixion. The Epistles and Gospel of John certainly con- tain polemical references to this heresy (I John 222, 42f., John 114, 653,2024-29), and it is possible that Luke too wanted, for this reason, to indicate the identity of the risen Christ with the flesh-and-blood Jesus.

The Old Testament instruction given on the road to Emmaus is now carried a stage further. Not only were the suffering and subsequent vindication of the Messiah integral to the divine purpose which was foretold or foreshadowed throughout the whole corpus of scripture; they were the divinely ordained means of dispensing forgiveness to the Gentile peoples. Accordingly the disciples are formally commissioned to undertake the missionary work of the Church. The stress on witness, the command to remain in Jerusalem (as against the tradition of Galilean appearances recorded by Matthew and implied by Mark), [the description of the Holy Spirit as power from on high promised by God through the prophets (Joel 2:28ff.), and the leave-taking on the Mount of Olives are themes that are taken up and expanded in the early chapters of Acts].

Easter Sunday (B)

So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb.

Jn 20:1-9

v. 1. On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb.

Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early:

The last time the word “early” was used in the gospel was at the time when Jesus was being led to the Praetorium forty-eight hours earlier. So swiftly does the new era begin.

Saw the stone removed from the tomb:

All four gospels record that the stone was rolled away before the women came. Matthew tells his readers that an angel moved it (Matt. 28zff). The tradition was evidently thought important by the evangelists, though it finds no place in the traditions about the resurrection in the epistles. Whatever rise the tradition has done, it has kept Christians from any temptation to seek communion with their Lord through physical `relics' of his body. This is entirely in keeping with the theology of the fourth gospel.

v. 2. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him.”

It is possible, as some commentators have suggested that the double object of the verb here implies that Peter was staying with the beloved disciple. This is not an impossible suggestion; Mary was certainly thought to be there by the author.

They have taken the Lord from the tomb:

This is an equivalent to a passive form of the verb and so possibly meant to ascribe the action to God. 

It seems to express, when read with the following sentences, simply the conviction that the body of Jesus had already been moved to its final resting-place, and that Mary did not know where it had been taken, or by whom it had been removed.

v. 3. So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb.

Mary had evidently expected that someone at the house would have known about the removal of the body. But no one did; hence Peter and the beloved disciple set out to investigate.

v. 5. He bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.

It would seem that though the tomb could be entered easily, it was not possible to survey the contents without stooping down. The entrance would not be very high.

v. 6. When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there.

When Lazarus was raised, he came from the tomb swathed in his cloths. The fact that the cloths were left lying seems to suggest that the Lord left the tomb in a manner different from that of Lazarus' resuscitated body. Resuscitation is not resurrection!

v. 8. Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed.

This can hardly be read save in the light of what John has to say about the word of the Lord to Thomas later  in the chapter. The beloved disciple saw the empty tomb and the abandoned cloth lying in it. On that sight, he believed. So does the evangelist begin to make it clear that it is not by seeing the earthly Jesus that one' sees'  the Lord. He can be 'seen' in this profounder sense through the witness of an empty grave.

v. 9. For they did not yet understand the scripture that he had to rise from the dead.

John does not specify what scripture he had in mind. But it may also be noted that the process of understanding all that Jesus Christ was and did sets the Christian out upon an unending adventure in coming to know more and more of the fullness of God's purpose as revealed in scripture.