Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne Monastery
I opened the beautiful pages of this gospel to a place where I know I will find Jesus’s love for all the people interconnected as the vine. [John 15] Usually, I can look past these intrusions of fear and judgment and just picture Jesus as I remember him with his friends, pleading to us to keep the deep love connection. He was begging for his love to be both his and ours, as one love together. Then, after the cross, we were left empty and terrified. Reading that gospel aloud it sounded too personal — too touching — for a the newly baptized Christians, so maybe some carets of corrections evolved, reading it and copying again and again, it becomes less intimate and more about the Roman style of judgement.
The imagery of beautiful vines — lush leaves and curlicues at every turn, along with cascades of grapes, sweet orbs of fruit, quenching, comforting, answering every thirst with the vintner’s clippers of judgement – then, the “fruitless” encumberments get lopped off.
Every time Jesus says the metaphor “I am the true vine and you are the branches” Someone fixes it to say, “well, except for…”
Somewhere the words of God’s love for everyone, when Jesus speaks of a vine that connects all people as part of the vine of God’s love, comes with the weight of human requirements on our own earthly selves. Fruitfulness hangs heavy in the Jesus words.
Or maybe these discriminating exceptions could simply be a shoring up of the gardening instruction for a vine metaphor offered by carpenter Jesus who serves wine, yet knows very little about vines. Or it could be adding more of that Roman anti-Semetic jargon already edited into this gospel, or it could mean as the sin-seeking Christians believe, that God prunes the sinners from the beloveds.
How many times and how many ways did Jesus have to say the fact of the matter, “we are all one together in God’s love.” Even though that would include the Roman soldier whose ear was mended in Luke, and Judas sitting at the table. It would include the monks we buried here yesterday far from that sinner novice buried among the saints and the pure. God’s love would include the Pagan raiders who didn’t find value in keeping the gospel as a treasure, or even as keeping me for their slave. Maybe God really also loves fruitless vines.
Or maybe God is sharpening the pruning shears just now.
We are human, and we can only know some things.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 