“I am the vine, you are the branches … abide in my love”
John’s Gospel, we have said, provides a strong underlying foundation for the movement of the pageant of the Passion throughout Holy Week. Today’s readings from the fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel are especially powerful. We are presented with the last of the so-called seven “I am” sayings of Jesus, metaphors that identify Christ with the God revealed to Moses in the burning bush and that envision the forms of our participation in the divine life. “I am,” Jesus says, “the bread of life,” “the way, the truth, and the life,” “the Resurrection and the life,” “the door of the sheep,” “the good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep,” “the light of the world,” and here, “the true vine.” Powerful images that belong entirely to our life with Christ. “Our whole life says Our Father,” Origen notes, because of the Word and Son of the Father who bids us pray, “Our Father.” We are drawn into an intimacy of the relation of the Father and the Son. “I have called you friends for all that I have heard from the Father I have made known to you.”
And yet, in the Continuation of the Passion, the one word from the Cross which Mark and Matthew give us is Christ’s cry of dereliction, of desolation. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is not, it seems, a cry to the Father. It is as if the intimacy of that relation is utterly hidden in the agony of the Passion. But it is a prayer, a prayer to God. A quote from the beginning of Psalm 22, it underscores for us as no other word does the full meaning of the desolation of sin. Sin is about our separation from God. Christ voices that sense of alienation and its devastating desolation in this word, what will come to be known as the fourth word of Christ from the Cross.
The readings from John’s Gospel highlight the organic nature of Christ’s relation to us. That is the power of the seventh “I am” saying. It is about God living in us, about the life of Christ in us without which we have no life. But this chapter is also about the dynamic of the Son’s life with the Father. We place Christ’s word of desolation in the love of the Son for the Father. “He who hates me, hates my Father also,” Jesus tells us. We are to feel something of the radical nature of sin in this word, in the suffering of Christ for us in this word. He suffers in this word the radical nature of our sin. And all because, as Isaiah tells us, the suffering servant did not turn back but embraces “the shame and the spitting” out of confidence that “the Lord God will help me” even when he feels to the fullest possible extent the alienation of sin.
Christ is the suffering servant in the Christian view. He is, too, “the righteous man” of Wisdom in this evening’s first lesson, the one who becomes the target of our evil and wickedness because his goodness is a threat to us in the ignorance of our sin and folly. All sin and evil is against the Good, against God. Yet in putting the righteous man to the test we are really putting God to the test. Such is our wilful blindness, our blindness to our true character and vocation. “For God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of his own eternity.” Christ’s cry in the experience of the desolation of our sins returns us to God and ultimately to the Father.
Christ’s cry of desolation takes him into the ultimate desolation of death. To see and hear the Crucified is to learn something about the true nature of our life with God and with one another. It is to be returned to the Father through the Son. It is what is grasped by the Centurion who having seen and heard the Crucified said, “truly this man was the Son of God.” The Son returns us to the Father. “Our whole life says our Father” and perhaps nowhere more powerfully than in this scene.
“I am the vine, you are the branches … abide in my love”
Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, April 7th
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak.