Fruitful lives - Peter Steele SJ

5th Sunday of Easter
John 15:1-8

If you have read or watched Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you may remember the moment at which the Prince, deploring what his country has come to, says that it is ‘an unweeded garden, that grows to seed: Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely’.

Shakespeare is fond of this image of the ruined or wretched garden, the place of fruitlessness; and no doubt it turns up in his writing partly because it turns up all too often in one of his great sources, the Bible. In the Good Friday readings, amongst the laments for humanity’s false moves, past and present, God is heard as saying that he did that endearing thing—planted a garden. But it came to little or nothing, and the strange, bitter fruit of Jesus on his death-tree is the evidence for this.

In our own century, the single most remarked-upon poem of all in English, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, picks up this motif of fruitlessness, of futility. We have come a long way, it would seem, from the dew-spangled foliage on Eden’s first morning.

I notice these things, of course, because of the gospel passage for today. There, the Lord Jesus, almost out of time, and urgent with his friends and followers, presses upon them the claims of fruitfulness, the vocation of fruitfulness. When we see, in stained glass, or on some pious page, a representation of a vine and its grapes, we know what is being signalled: we know that today’s gospel is being pictured.

It is easy enough for that insignia to stay recognised but inconsequential, almost as when, patrolling the aisles of a supermarket, we comprehend one brand name or logo after another, and ignore most of them. It could not have been like that when, at the end of a meal at which wine had been drunk ceremoniously, and the air was thick with talk of life and death, the vine, and the grapes, and the implicit crushing and transformation of the grapes, were pointed to. At the Last Supper, the final meal before the execution, Jesus was talking seriously when he talked of fruits and fruitfulness.

In every Eucharist, we once more we hear the urgent summons to live fruitfully—not to be a wasteland, not to be just vacant lots or vacant plots, as if we were something marked out for nothing better than a city dump or a grave. It is most unlikely that a simple hearing of the call to fruitfulness will work big magic upon us. After all, look what happened to the first hearers—virtually to a man they melted away within the hour, and who of us cannot understand this?

And as for ourselves, we have heard the words before, some of us many times, about Jesus as vine and ourselves as his out-growth and his potential fruit, and his Father as the vine-grower: and we know, do we not, that the hearing of even a sacred metaphor does not of itself quicken us with change?

And yet, I must say—and we all must try to believe—that it is an urgent matter that our lives be fruitful. Because of God’s passion for life, we have been brought to life in our mothers’ wombs: because of God’s passion for life, we have, each of us and all of us, been joined in our personal distresses and mortal need by the Son of God and the Spirit of God. These are old stories, but they are not stale facts: they are fresher than the moment when some of us shaved this morning, and some of us put on our makeup.

The Father of life, and the enlivened Son, and the Spirit of their shared life, all bid for our attention, our concern, our commitment, at the Eucharist, which is entirely a dramatising of their offer and of our attempted response. There is a partly-dwindled garden in the heart of each of us, in our wits and esprit and personal policy, a garden which, if we really do care that this should happen, can be quickened into fruitfulness.

And there is a partly-dwindled garden in which all human beings have a stake—the garden of our regard for one another, our hopes and passionate care for one another which can be transformed by the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Neither garden will be transformed, neither milieu of fruitfulness will be fostered, without pain, exertion, and likely humiliation: the avenue to Eden always leads through Gethsemane. When we see the banks of shining fruit shines in our local greengrocer, we know that it has been all grown elsewhere—through patience and a readiness to start again many times, and an awed trust that small dark seeds can issue in splendid living things.

Let us pray for one another today, that we may never despair of fruitfulness, and that we may not turn back from paying its price.