Joy on Miracle Grow.
by Jodi-Renee Adams
Gospel Reading: John 15.9-17
For Sunday, May 23, Year B − Easter 6
In one of the most familiar monologues given by Christ, John uncorks images of joy-giving love—love that makes Christ our brother and no longer our Master.
We hear Christ repeat the word love nine times in eight verses. That’s a lot of love. But the second most often repeated word? Command. This is also a text about following orders and making sacrificial choices.
In other words, there’s a lot of head nodding and then brow furrowing in this text.
Vines and Branches make Good Wine.
Just before this mind-bending monologue about loving as commanded, Jesus talks to the disciples about vines and branches, using the power of metaphor to make his point.
No doubt, you’ve somewhere along the way seen a myriad of viney-branchy decorative stuff in your local Christian bookstore. If you haven’t, well-done and GOD-speed. If you have, you get the irony that many of us who have shopped in said Christian stores didn’t grow up with the notion that wine drinking was acceptable. Just a funny paradox I thought I’d point out.
All that is to say, that, as a recovering cultural evangelical, I developed, albeit late in life, a great appreciation for good wine. Between the coaching of knowledgeable friends and a couple summers in France, I started to get the gist of it and fostered a real curiosity about how the different wines come to be, how the farmer nurtures the soil and the location in order to develop the best kind of grape for that specific wine. In other words, certain soil facing certain direction with certain sun begets a certain fabulous wine.
But I digress. Unlike Jesus.
Vintage Jesus
Jesus comes barreling out of this oenological analogy into an insistent directive to love, his ultimate command. Vintage Jesus that’s somehow connected to yet another image: “Remain in me.”
This part I get—well, on paper anyway. It’s another beautiful word picture. Remain in me...allow me to indwell you. Like the soil in a vineyard, allow all that I am - the complete essence of love - to indwell you, to be existent, to be unchanged so that you can be fully alive to the point of being life giving.
That’s a really kind and gracious image. Beautiful and self-nurturing, really. It resonates with my American narcissistic spirituality that wants Christianity to make me feel better about myself and about life.
Pour Me Out or Pour Me Another?
But here’s the part I don’t like: Jesus kind of feels like he’s throwing out a bait and switch. “You are my friends if you do what I command” (emphasis is obviously mine because this is how I hear this in my head, along with...)….”you did not choose me, but I chose you.”
Yikes, Jesus is getting bossy.
We can play together if we can play my game. I get it; he’s the Sustainer of the Universe. He gets to call the shots; but this doesn’t feel copacetic with the whole “remain in me and my love so that your joy may be complete and let me pour you another Jesus” that we bumped into in the first part of the text.
I get nervous around commands. Like, there’s only one right way to do it? Really? Jesus gets even more specific here, making it even more intimidating. “Lay down your life for your friends.” I have serious baggage around being a doormat and this sounds an awful lot like doormattery—a severe wine pressing, if you will. Yet it’s really the only specific he gives about it before the closer: “Love each other.”
The Hardest Question
So maybe all we really need is love, eh? If I love well (and by that I mean selflessly and in the spirit of a merciful Christ), I receive the full and overwhelming joy that comes from knowing GOD loves me. So will love get us there? Or is it the obeying? Or the remaining? Or the laying down? Dang. What gets us the place where we can ask the Father for whatever we need and we’ll receive it?
Nursery duty, that’s got to be it!
Then pour me another.
Jodi-Renee Adams is a mess of heretical orthodoxy serving the Evangelical Covenant Church. She pastors Ecclesia Denver and does her best to write evangelical liturgy that has beauty and truth and not too many fluffy adjectives. The rest of her time is spent giving rest to Denver’s weary souls at her gigs as a jazz and soul singer.
