April 29, 2024
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for the 5th Sunday of Easter (Year B) on April 28, 2024 at the Paulist Center in Boston, MA. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Acts 9:26-31; Psalm 22; 1 John 3:18-24; and John 15:1-8.
Today’s gospel passage is the metaphor of the vine and the branches, but what does that mean to a bunch of city-dwellers and suburbanites, who don’t know how to harvest grapes? For most professional viticulturists, harvesting lasts only a month. The rest of the year is spent on maintenance tasks that are essential to obtaining an ongoing, reliable harvest – cutting shoots, trellising, ploughing down, de-budding, trimming, leaf thinning, and especially pruning. Jesus says that we are like branches that are pruned by God.
The diagram above (by Urban Wine Grower) shows how professionals prune a grape vine over its first three years. It looks catastrophic to cut the growth back so severely. But consistent, deep pruning leads to vines that produce sixteen times as much fruit as unpruned vines!
In each of our lives, there have been times when doors were closed to us, but we eventually found other opportunities and continued to grow. Each time, before the new opportunity presented itself, we may have felt lost or upset. But looking back, some setbacks allowed us to flourish in new ways.
Even when we walk through a dark valley, God invites each of us to a life of abundance and resurrection. We celebrate again with the waters of baptism.
I was 27 years old when I first became convinced that God was calling me to consider the priesthood. I became an affiliate with the seminary of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, and it seemed to be going really well. But nine months later, the diocesan psychologist blocked my seminary application. He argued that I was not mature enough to become a priest. I was devastated. Did God want me to spend the next 40 years of my life as an engineer? What was I supposed to tell my family and my friends who knew that I had been discerning the priesthood?
Granted, not everything that happens to us – including not all the seemingly bad stuff – is part of the will of God. But for me, I now look back at that morning meeting in Dr. Pacoe’s office in February 2002 not as a death, but as a pruning. If he had approved my application, I probably would not have engaged in so much spiritual introspection. I’d have never become a Paulist, and I surely wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be the Director of the Paulist Center these past two years. I can point to other rough periods in my life that seemed like dead ends but turned out to be great pathways for growth.
Even the most passionate disciples must continue doing the maintenance work – the pruning, the plowing, the discerning – throughout all our years of discipleship. Not every moment is the moment of harvest. If you read between the lines, it’s clear that after Paul’s conversion, the other apostles thought that he was too brusque and rude to effectively preach the gospel. They sent him back to his hometown of Tarsus maybe for as long as 10 years(!) to grow and mellow out before he took his famous missionary journeys and wrote his influential epistles.
Paul may have been overly eager, but on the other hand, some of us can be too hesitant. We delude ourselves into thinking that we need to reach some abstract level of “holiness” before we can produce spiritual fruit. It’s sort of like the artificial way we talk about the life of professional musicians. We speak as if for years of their lives, they engage in one activity, called “practice,” so that they can spend the later portion of their lives in a separate activity called “playing.” But we know that’s not how it works. Practicing is not a separate activity from playing, just as bearing spiritual fruit is not a separate activity from discipleship. There’s no need to have a theology degree to serve the poor. Common sense tells us to recognize the dignity of every person. The only way we get better at Christian living is to do it, just as the only way to improve one’s musical technique is to play one’s instrument.
The last line of our gospel passage drives this point home. We’re at the Last Supper, and the people gathered at the table with Jesus have followed him for a long time and over a lot of miles. Yet Jesus commands them to “bear much fruit and become my disciples.” That phrasing indicates that we can bear fruit even while we’re still figuring out what it means to be a disciple. A well-tended grapevine produces abundant fruit almost every year, not just in the last year of its life. But such abundance requires ongoing maintenance and care.
We face the reality of ongoing maintenance and pruning not only as individuals, but also as a community. Some of us are tempted to spend so much energy mourning the losses we’ve experienced within this community that we neglect to notice all the new members who have joined us and all the new ministries happening. The Paulist Fathers’ recent decisions mean that more changes are coming to the Paulist Center in the next few months. But I believe that such changes and pruning are preparing this community for a bright future. If we ever think we completely have our discipleship act together, that’s probably the moment when we stop bearing fruit. We need to continually tend to our health as a community, maintaining the friendships we already have and building deep bonds with those people new to our community of disciples.
Jesus is the vine; we are the branches. The better we care for one another, the closer we will grow to one another, and the closer we will grow to Jesus, too. My prayer today for all of us is the same prayer I will offer to our neophyte Catholics on the last day of our formal OCIA process in a few weeks: “Go forth and bear fruit.”