Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus tells his disciples—and us too—that his relationship with us is that of a vine to its branches. This agricultural picture, with its rich resonances, suggests the following:

• Even as the Israelites were imagined as a vine in the Old Testament, so we, the Church form a new community of God by virtue of our connection to Christ.
• Christ is the center of our identity as Christians. A Church community without Christ fails to be Church or community in a basic sense. Branches can only be branches when the vine connects them.
• The vine metaphor means that Christianity is a way of life in conjunction with our experience of God. Such a picture of faith precludes a mere assent to a set of beliefs, insofar as ideas cannot substitute for real life—important though ideas remain. Nor is faith limited to a set of feelings or personal intuitions, because God remains all-in-all and essentially beyond our capacity to fully comprehend. Instead of these limited approaches (thinking vs. feeling), real experience of God who is mystery, together with the lived experience (I.e., teaching) of those who love God, yields growth and Christlikeness.
• Being in Christ yields fruit, which is a gift to the branches from the vine itself.
• It follows that the great reality of living in the Church is to abide in Christ, with all this entails: the experience of community with the Body of Christ, unity with God as an progressive dynamic, bearing fruit, learning to obey the commandments, loving our neighbors (and the enemies of Christ) by means of Christ’s own self-emptying love. All of this is difficult and the work of a lifetime, but we manage progress (if we do) through the vivifying gift of God’s grace and love.

Yours in Christ,

—Justin