Author: CCW

“I am the vine, ye are the branches”

“I am the vine,” Jesus says, “ye are the branches.” It is one of the greatest of the so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus with predicates – metaphors which have to do with God’s relation to us through the divine self-relation. In this case, the metaphor is that of the vine and the branches that belong to the idea of indwelling, our dwelling in God and God in us. As one of the “I am” sayings it points us to the divine revelation of God to Moses through the Burning Bush, “I am who I am.” It is a strong endorsement of the essential divinity of Christ and a powerful image about our life in and with God sacramentally. It is significant that this is the Gospel chosen for the commemoration of St. Matthias.

Why? Because of the interrelation of the two concepts of substitution and indwelling or incorporation into the body of Christ. Matthias is the disciple chosen by lot and by prayer to take the place of the traitor Judas. As the Collect reminds us, we cannot think about Matthias without recalling Judas’ betrayal. He is chosen to take Judas’ place not as a betrayer but as a faithful apostle. He is chosen to be an essential part of the apostolic fellowship which lives and can only live from Christ. The imagery of vine and branches is something organic and dynamic. The life-blood of the Church as the body of Christ is Christ’s life in us sacramentally.

The Gospel and the Lesson are most instructive. The Lesson from Acts focuses on the act of choosing, implicitly confirming the origins of ecclesiastical polity but as based upon a theological insight. What is that insight? The form of our indwelling God through the Word made flesh and the way in which that truth is made known to us.

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“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart,
having heard the word, keep it and bring forth fruit with patience.”

The parable of the sower and the seed focuses our attention on the quality of the ground upon which the Word of God is sown. It recalls the story of the Fall. The ground is cursed. Adam, who at once signifies our humanity collectively and as an individual, is told “cursed is the ground because of you, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” The ground is cursed because Adam and Eve succumbed to the beguiling wisdom of the serpent and thus lost the ground of their standing with God. The ground of creation becomes the place of alienation from God. Our labour, as we saw last week, is based upon this sense of separation yet becomes a part of the work of redemption. We are returned to God but only through our awareness of our connection to the ground, to the dust of creation.

Recall the story from Genesis. In a lovely image, God is said to have “walked in the garden in the cool of the day”, but where were we? We had hidden ourselves from his presence. Why? Our fear is the beginning of an awareness of our self-willed separation from him. It is important to understand something of what this means.

The story of the Fall seeks to explain the origin of sin and evil, of suffering and death. It locates the problem not in the material universe – the problem is not with the dust of nature – but in the disobedience of man. As disobedience, it is an act of the will against what is known as good. Creation as a whole and in its individual parts is emphatically and unambiguously declared to be “good”; in fact, “very good.” The commandment given to man – and only to man – is also by definition good. It is implicitly known as good.

Alone of all creation, the Adam – our humanity – is said to be made in the image of God. Less abstractly but in a complementary image, man is said to be “formed from the dust” and to have had God’s spirit “breathed into him”. He is a spiritual creature with a relation to every other created being and with a special relation to the Creator. The Fall is about the disorder of that relationship. As made in the image of God, man is capable of knowing God. Hence he is given to name the things of creation, which is to say, he is capable of knowing God’s knowing of the things he has made. And he is given a commandment.

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“Why stand ye here all the day idle?”

The answer is clear and prescient: “because no man hath hired us.” Welcome to the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Welcome to the “brave new world” of digital exuberance. There will be fewer and fewer jobs. There will be more and more of the idle and the unemployed. Welcome to the world of automation only just beginning to ramp up. No work and all play? Think again.

Alarmist? Reactionary? Maybe. But when Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk concur that the greatest danger facing our humanity is AI – artificial intelligence – then, perhaps, even the most confirmed digital cheerleader might, just might, pause for a moment and reflect. Even, perhaps, Yuval Noah Harari, the latest super-exuberant cheerleader for a brave new world of a digitally enhanced humanity. “Now we see through a glass,” digitally, some may think, but make no mistake it will still be “through a glass darkly”. Quite apart from the myopia! There is nothing else to see, after all, if it isn’t on your screen. What can’t be seen on your screen doesn’t exist. “O brave, new world”, indeed.

Okay. A bit of rhetorical excess on my part, I admit. The rant’s over. The readings for Septuagesima Sunday speak rather profoundly to an important aspect of our contemporary dystopia. On the one hand, we are easily seduced by the obvious wonders of technology, especially in medicine and in terms of communication, or so we think. We are rightly impressed with some of the progresses in medical science, to be sure, but I leave it to you to decide whether our culture is really better informed and wiser than previous ages. On the other hand, we are largely oblivious to the ethical and intellectual problems that come with all of that. They are not insurmountable, in my view, since all of these problems are our problems. This is, as you have probably guessed, the segue to the Gospel. The very point when we realise that “Houston, we [don’t] have lift off”, is the point when we realise that the deep dilemmas of the human community cannot be solved simply by us through technological ingenuity. Ancient wisdom, certainly Christian wisdom, has been largely ignored and forgotten. The problem is not with technology – that over-used, abused and largely meaningless word – the problem is with us, with our approach to one another, to nature, and, ultimately, to God.

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