Christ Church

“Apart from me ye can do nothing.”

“I am the vine, ye are the branches … abide in me,” Jesus says, in what is known as the last of his famous “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel. For “apart from me ye can do nothing.” The truth and meaning of who we are is found in our being in Christ, our lives enfolded and engrafted into his living word and truth. This second lesson speaks profoundly and provocatively about the nature of our abiding in Christ. In some ways, the image is the greatest of the images of our incorporation into the divine life through the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ. We live in him and he in us.

But how? Only by attending to his word. It may be, as Peter points out to Jesus in the remarkable Eucharistic gospel for Trinity V, that “we have toiled all the night long and have taken nothing; nevertheless, at thy word, I will let down the net.” “At thy word” is the note of saving grace, the note of the means of our abiding in Christ. His word lives in us if we will let it.

The trouble is that we often refuse to hear. We reject the word and truth of God. What that means is shown in the first lesson from The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah, a prophet whose word and presence is unwelcome to King Jehoiakim, has dictated to Baruch, his scribe, “all the words of the Lord which he had spoken to him.” He has written them on a scroll, presumably of papyrus. Then Baruch reads the words of Jeremiah first “in the hearing of all the people,” then, before the court officials, and then, before the princes. Clearly deeply troubled by what they hear, the princes bid Baruch and Jeremiah go into hiding. Finally, the scroll is read before the King. Is he moved to listen to the word of the Lord from the prophet Jeremiah? Not in the least.

In an image that is breath-taking for its utter disdain and dismal of God’s word, and without even a whimper of conscience, it seems, the King cuts up the scroll into pieces as it is read and throws them into the fire “until the entire scroll was consumed.”

Nothing could capture better the idea of the rejection of God’s word. It is an act of willfulness and not of ignorance. It is symbolic, too, of the death of our souls and of our cultures. The destruction of the scroll is symbolic of the death of Jehoikim. Apart from me not only can you do nothing; apart from me you are nothing.

We only live when we are alive to the word of God and find the truth and meaning of our lives in God’s Word and Son. We can reject it – cutting it up into little pieces and burning it – or we can embrace it and let his word define our thinking and our doing. The Scriptures are only a dead letter when we are dead to them. No greater image of that than the spectacle of a King using his penknife to cut up the scroll of Jeremiah. In rejecting the God-inspired words of the prophet, we reject the God of prophecy and truth. We reject what God seeks and wants for us, captured so powerfully in Jesus’ word that “I am the vine, Ye are the branches … abide in me.” For

“Apart from me ye can do nothing.”

Fr. David Curry
All Saints’, Leminster
Trinity V, Evensong