Refounding experience

Today’s readings: Acts 9, 26-31; 1 John 3, 18-24; John 15, 1-8.

Very often today we speak of the need to go back to our roots. That is also what we as Christians are called to do in this day and age when memory at all levels of life seems to become weaker and weaker.

The parable of the vine connects with the song about the vineyard we find in the prophet Isaiah. The song starts off on a good note but the mood suddenly changes because the vineyard, instead of choice fruit, produced sour grapes. The vineyard in Isaiah is Israel and the love song ends with the prospect of God abandoning his people.

Now Jesus presents himself as “the true vine”. As Pope Benedict XVI writes in his book Jesus of Nazareth, “The vine is no longer merely a creature that God looks upon with love, but that He can still uproot and reject. In the Son, He Himself has become the vine; He has forever identified Himself, His very being, with the vine”.

Hence the emphasis on the part of Jesus in today’s gospel on being ‘the true vine’ as if to indicate in himself the end of the road, the fulfillment, the ultimate meaning. This definitiveness, this completion is the resurrection and its ‘point of no return’ character is witnessed to in the experience of Saul become Paul as given in Acts.

Since Easter Sunday it was the risen Jesus who was not recognisable for those around him and who had known him for years. Today, as we read from Acts, the same thing happens with Saul “They could not believe he was really a disciple”.

Staunchly a Pharisee, his flag was the law. It was his strength and his weakness. His refounding in Christ, the true vine, converted him from being a disciple of the law to becoming a disciple of Jesus.

This is actually the transition much needed in our churches in this age of re-evangelisation. The challenge ahead is to know Jesus Christ who is above the law, to become his disciples, and to let go of the security our culture always provided.

The Church in its totality is called to pass from a Christian experience rooted in culture to an experience rooted in the person of Jesus Christ.

It is true and we believe it that Jesus founded the Church. But the deeper truth would be that our Christian experience needs to be refounded not simply in Jesus the founder but in Jesus risen.

That was the originating experience of Christianity itself. Those are our roots to which we are called to go back in order to regenerate new life in our churches and hearts.

The imagery of the tree, like that of the body, speaks of a belonging that goes beyond mere membership. It is more a connecting with the source from where we receive life. It is a re-sourcing that surpasses the individual conditionings we very often feel bound to.

We all some time or other aspire to find a way out of our anxieties, out of the prisons we create for ourselves. We cannot grow up depending on our own selves. There is a source outside that provides us with sure points of reference that give shape to our personal growth.

Autonomy is a good to be desired and achieved. But experience shows that autonomy turned into individualism or self-sufficiency is dangerous because it distorts who we really are and are called to be.

There is a big truth in the words of Jesus “Cut off from me you can do nothing”. They are words that sound too offensive in an age of autonomy and self-reliance.

But that remains the major truth that Jesus communicates with his imagery of the vine. The alternative is what very often we are experiencing today in society’s disintegration and in our inner fragmentation.

Our dependence on Jesus as the true vine is in no way a dependence that is subjecting or even enslaving. It is a dependence that creates harmony between us and inside us.