The Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A
May 5, 2002
Christ Church, Covington

“Abide in me as I abide in you” (Jo. 15:4). 

The Gospel writer John has his own way of telling his story; his own issues, concerns, and emphases that color the Gospel that bears his name. Our reading today provides a keystone of sorts for one of John’s great themes, which is the connection between the believer and Jesus Christ. Ask yourself the question, “What is the objective of the Christian life?”, or “What does it mean to be a disciple?” Or you might even pose the question, “Why are we here today?” For John the answer to such a question is plain, as Jesus’ teaching is plain: we are here because we are united to Christ; we are here because we seek intimacy with him. This is “the end of our vocation”, as an old prayer puts it, the goal or summit of the Christian faith.

In our Gospel, Jesus uses the metaphor of the vine and the branches to express this notion of union. It’s an organic image, one that had been used before by the prophet Isaiah to describe Israel. “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting” (Is. 5:7). Now Jesus uses it to describe the relationship between himself and his People; God is still the gardener who plants and prunes, but in himself, Jesus gathers together the whole of the new Israel. “I am the vine, you are the branches” (Jo. 15:5). In other words, there is a new intimacy in this old organic image, as the Son of God takes the place of or even becomes Israel, and gathers the branches into the vine.

Intimacy: a relationship of love in which the two, while distinct, are one. Jesus’ words play to this theme in John’s Gospel. “Abide in me as I abide in you”. This is where the disciple is meant to be: with Jesus, abiding in him as he abides in us. Quite a bit of conventional religion substitutes “respect”, “deference”, or even a chilly politeness for what Jesus is talking about here with “abiding”. But nothing could be more different from the relationship to which Jesus calls his disciples. Christian belief does not call for us to pay tribute to a distant potentate, to acknowledge from afar the existence of God. Christian belief calls us to enter into an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ, who is in us as we are in him.

The Sacraments that we gather to celebrate are powerful and effective signs of that intimate union to which we are called. In Baptism we take on the character of Christ; as Jesus says to Peter at the foot washing of Maundy Thursday (in words which were very quickly interpreted in the Christian tradition to speak of Baptism), “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me” (Jo. 13:8). We are washed by Jesus in Baptism, and share his life, his identity in fact. As Jesus says in our reading today, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (Jo. 15:5). It is Jesus, living and working in us, who makes all things possible.

So it is that at the Eucharist, Jesus gives us his Body and Blood, so that his life may be in us. Again, as Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (Jo. 6:56). This abiding comes from the faithful reception of the outward and visible signs of our intimacy with Jesus Christ, in which we become living members of Christ. It is this desire for new life, for intimacy with Christ, that brings us to this altar today.

Yet we must go one step further in our understanding of the Christian life, if we would really understand the nature of this relationship to which God has called us, this intimacy with Christ. Here we must, as Jesus himself does just a little later, use the word “love”. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love” (Jo. 15:9). Here we go beyond the metaphor of vine and branches, and come into the presence of something even more intimate. Without this word, God will remain distant from our minds and hearts, because we will have distanced him from ourselves.

This word “love” is the clue to everything that the Gospel writer John wants to say about our relationship with Jesus Christ. It is this love that connects us with Jesus: the love that is between the Father and the Son that is shared with us in the power of the Spirit. It is this love that gives us joy; it is this love that we are called to share with others. It is for this love that we prayed in our collect a few minutes ago, that it might be poured into our hearts so that we might love God “in all things and above all things”. The promises that God calls us to in this intimate, loving relationship with Christ truly exceed all that we can desire. It is this love that brings us to the altar today; it is this love that brings us into relationship with each other; it is this love that will bring us into the kingdom of God.


The Rev’d John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.

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