John 15.1, 5, 9-11
The theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg was born into a family of radical unbelievers in 1928 in Stettin, Germany. His parents obeyed social custom and had their baby baptized in the Lutheran Church, after which Pannenberg had absolutely no contact of any sort with the church. Nonetheless, baptism had grafted him into the Body of Christ. His father was a German customs official, a post that under the Third Reich required Nazi Party affiliation. His parents raised their son as a strict atheist, more fluent in modern criticisms of religion than in Christian doctrine itself. As Pannenberg told Time magazine years later, “I was nourished on Friedrich Nietzsche’s [God is Dead] philosophy.”
Nourished.
He did not say he had read a little of the atheist philosopher in school. He said that at home his parents sustained him on an intellectual diet of Christianity’s chief modern critic. And then one day, when he was sixteen years old, as the world war waned, the unbelieving boy experienced a life-altering encounter with the Jesus whose death he had been fed to believe.
He was walking home from a piano lesson. He was in the woods. Suddenly he was not alone. Like the three disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration, he was engulfed by an uncreated light. Only later would he learn to speak Christian, such that he could name the one who had encountered him that afternoon on the way home.
Pannenberg writes:
“The sun was setting, and, though I had experienced many sunsets before, there was a moment when there was no difference between myself and the light surrounding me. This is not easy to describe. Perhaps others have had similar experiences. I don’t claim uniqueness to my experience, but in my case— given my atheistic upbringing— it made me think. It opened me to the mystery of reality.”
Notice, Pannenberg did not say his encounter opened him to the reality of mystery; as though, there is the given world and within what we call the real world there are exceptions, instances of the mysterious, fingerprints of God. No, Pannenberg testifies that his experience opened to him the mystery that is reality. Contrary to God being dead, as he had been nourished to believe, Pannenberg discovered that the real world— the ordinary, every day we take for granted— is no less charged, no less sacramental, than loaf and cup.
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Reality is more mysterious than it appears to eyes accustomed to it.
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When Jesus leaves the Upper Room and heads to the Garden of Gethsemane, before he passes through the Kidron Valley he will walk along the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. Above the gate into the Temple, King Herod had mounted a golden thicket of vines from which hung clusters of grapes as tall as a man’s height. No mere decorative flourish, the image of vineyard and vine was as essential to Israel’s self-identity as the Temple itself, the commandments which the Temple housed, or even the promised land on which the Temple stood. Christ’s own scriptures liken Israel’s rescue from slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt to transplantation, “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it. You cleared the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land. The mountains were covered with its shade, the mighty cedars with its branches. It sent out its branches to the sea and its shoots to the River.” In the Song of Songs, which synagogue and church would learn to hear as a song of God’s covenant love, the vineyard becomes the place of desire, delight, and bodily union. “My vineyard, my very own, is before me,” the lovers extol one another.
The vine motif also serves a darker purpose in Israel’s scriptures, becoming a blemished image for the people’s infidelity to the covenant and their idolatrous political entanglements. “Let me sing for my beloved,” declares the prophet Isaiah, “my love song concerning his vineyard.” As it turns out, the prophet’s ballad is a tragic song. The beloved plants his vineyard on a fertile hill, “but it yielded only wild grapes.” Worse than wild grapes, the Weeping Prophet Jeremiah indicts the vine-that-is-Israel as “degenerate.” In exile, Ezekiel laments that the vine has become fit only for fuel for the fire.”
Whether it speaks blessing or indicts sin, the image of the vine in Christ’s own scriptures never once refers to an elect individual but always instead refers to the whole covenant community. Gathered or scattered, faithful or degenerate, set free or sent into exile, in every instance the vine always refers to everybody. So when Jesus stands in the Upper Room and issues his final Burning Bush utterance, he does not posit himself as a faithful member of the tribe of Israel. He insists, astonishingly, that he is the true Israelite; or rather, he is all of God’s Israel in the flesh. Amos and Abraham, Sarah and Jonah and Ruth and David— Mary’s boy is somehow all of them.
But the mystery does not stop there.
The restrictive clause ventures an even stranger claim. “I AM the vine,” Jesus says, “you are the branches.” We are so accustomed to this passage we no longer see the mystery of reality. Jesus does not say, “I AM the vine, and you are nearby me.” Jesus does not even say, “I AM the vineyard, and you all are my vines.” Jesus says, “I AM the vine, and you are the branches— of me!”
Throughout chapter fifteen of the Farewell Discourse, Jesus uses the first person pronoun sixty-six times in twenty-seven verses. On the one hand, it appears he is talking entirely about himself in the Upper Room; on the other hand, he posits himself here such that there is now no way of speaking of Jesus that does not include you. The claims of scripture are discombobulating if we can learn not to look the other way. It is relatively easy to insist that Jesus is not dead. It is entirely disorienting to claim that Jesus is not Jesus without you. And you. And me.
“I AM the vine; you are my branches.” There is not much to a vine other than its branches. Take away the branches and there is no longer any vine. In other words, we do not belong to him the way a nation belongs to a king, a servant to a master’s estate, or a flock to its shepherd. In fact, though we remain other from him, we are not separate from him; we are one organism with him.
Indeed that we are a single organism with Jesus explains his otherwise odd choice of verb in the command which follows, “Abide in my love.”
Literally, “Stay put in my love.”
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The poet W. H. Auden once wrote that it was easy enough to say, “I will love you forever.” The difficult thing to say and to mean is “I will love you at 4:15 next Tuesday.”
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This Thursday I woke at five in the morning in order to drive a dear friend to his biopsy at Johns Hopkins. I was terrified of oversleeping and letting him down so I spent most of the night awake. Later in the morning we drove home from Baltimore chewing on his oncologist’s parting words, “We need to wait for the official report, but I’m ninety percent sure your cancer is back.”
Having not slept the night before, I was exhausted when I finally got home midday on Thursday. I threw off my sneakers and loosened my belt and laid down to take a nap. As soon as my head hit the pillow, though, I heard my phone ding— a text message.
Two messages actually, one after the other, in imperfect English.
“My daughter need you.”
“Come to hospital and help.”
When I didn’t immediately respond, she texted me again, “Rápido!”
I didn’t recognize the number, but I did see a prior, older text message she had sent me on October 12, 2022, demanding I go to Fairfax Hospital, to the Pediatric ICU, to pray over her daughter.
“Help her,” it read.
Almost four years ago, on my way home from a wedding, I stopped at the store to pick up groceries. A woman sat on the ground at the end of the wheelchair ramp holding a sign she had made from an Amazon delivery box. I still had my clergy collar underneath my charcoal suit, and her eyes fixed on me.
“Dammit,” I muttered under my breath.
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t have any cash, but I can buy you some food with my card.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I take Venmo.”
“You take Venmo?”
She nodded.
“But if I send you money on Venmo, then you’ll have my phone number.”
I didn’t add: “And then I’ll be pulled into a relationship with you and who knows what in the world you’ll demand from me next.”
“Yes,” she replied matter-of-factly.
Not wanting to be the bad guy in a contemporary parable, I sent her money.
And then I prayed with her.
Two days later she messaged me, “Pray for me?”
A couple of days after that she asked me to come to Fairfax Hospital, to the Pediatric ICU, to pray over her daughter.
Her daughter was named Grace.
Grace was maybe five or six. As soon as I entered her room and saw the thinned patches of remaining hair and the sallow chemo-glow of her complexion, I knew what ailed her. Her mother sat on the floor with her back against the wall, just as she had outside the grocery store. When she saw me, she got up and laid her hands on either side of my neck—as though my clergy collar was a life raft and she was drowning.
A boy not much older than Grace had apparently been appointed spokesperson for the family.
“Padre, we are afraid—the doctor has said—that she may not live. Her mother would like you to baptize her. Can you do that for her?”
“Of course.”
A few moments later, the family circled around Grace’s bed. I poured tap water from an empty carton of Ensure into a pink plastic receptacle.
“Pour out your Holy Spirit,” I prayed, “to bless this gift of water and Grace who receives it, to wash away her sin and clothe her in Christ.”
I was not stingy with the water. We watched as the sacrament moved through the fine black hair still holding out on her head.
When I turned to leave, Grace’s mother grabbed my collar again.
“Will we see you again?”
I actually thought about it.
And then I nodded.
“I expect so. Grace is baptized. She’s a part of Jesus now. We’re stuck with each other.”
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That was four years ago this fall.
This Thursday, I turned in my bed and picked up my phone to see my wager to her come true, “Rápido!”
It is easy to say I’ll love you forever.
On Thursday at 5:15?
Grace was older and bigger but still recognizable. And still thin and sick-looking. I got there just before Grace’s breath became air. I hadn’t bothered to put on my collar. I’m not sure if they recognized me or simply assumed that if I was there then I was there to help in some way. I didn’t bother with pleasantries or permission. Her eyes were half-closed and unfocused. I stepped to her side. I took the top off the big plastic water cup on the bedside table. I dipped my thumb into the chipped ice and made the sign of the cross on her forehead. Then I took her hand and I spoke into her ear, “Grace, remember your baptism where God declared that you are his and he will never let you go. The next voice you hear will be the LORD Jesus welcoming you into the resurrection.”
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Except, if we take God at his word, then Grace had already heard the LORD Jesus speak to her. He had addressed her from all the assembled lips of those at her bedside who had stayed put for her.
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The sixteen-year-old atheist in the woods would go on to become one of the most consequential theologians of the twentieth century, a lively interlocutor of Karl Barth and the lifelong friend of Robert Jenson. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the boy who had been nourished on the news that God was dead would spend the rest of his life vigorously defending the church’s most audacious announcement. That the dead Jesus is alive.
Recalling his mystical encounter with the Risen Jesus, Wolfhart Pannenberg writes:
“I was suddenly enveloped by light and absorbed in a sea of light which protected me from a direct vision of the one from whom the light came. Although it did not extinguish the humble awareness of my finite existence, it overflowed the barriers that normally separate us from the surrounding world. Only several months earlier I had narrowly escaped an American bombardment at Berlin— escaped for this, I thought. Having been formed as an atheist, did not know at the time that that day, January 6, was Epiphany, the celebration of Christ’s Glorification, the feast when the prophet’s words are fulfilled in Jesus, “Arise, shine, for your light has come.” As the church gathered around those words as the body of Jesus, the same transfiguring light of Christ had gathered around me. Only later did I realize that the apparently two different events, church and encounter, were in fact the same Jesus.”
The mystery of reality.
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In an unpublished essay entitled “The Community of the Resurrection,” Robert Jenson asks a deceptively simple question, “If Jesus is risen from the dead, what is now the case that otherwise would not be?”
His first answer is almost embarrassingly literal. There is one more living person than we otherwise had reason to expect, and Jesus of Nazareth is that person. Resurrection does not mean Jesus’ memory survived him or that his cause lives on in his followers. The one who was dead now lives. And if Jesus is alive, Jenson reasons, then he must have a body. Your body, Jenson argues, is yourself as you are available to others. Your body is how someone can locate you, address you, embrace you, wound you, love you.
So where is the risen Jesus available to us? Jenson’s answer is startling, “There remains only one answer: the communal entity we call the church.” He does not mean the church resembles Christ’s body while the risen Jesus resides somewhere else. Which sounds outrageous until Saul hears a voice on the Damascus Road asking, “Why are you persecuting me?”
Saul never touched Jesus.
He persecuted the church.
But Jesus says, “Me.”
Jenson writes:
“It is not the case that there are two things, Christ’s risen body and the church, which are then somehow so related that the church can be in a derived sense called the “the body of Christ.” The mystical body is the only body the risen LORD has or needs. When we meet and look at each other we see him; when we violate our fellowship, it is his body we shamefully fail to discern. Indeed, whenever we pray to the LORD Jesus, we ought not close our eyes but look at one another.”
Jenson’s claim sounds considerably less strange once we notice that Jesus has already said it, “I AM the vine; you are the branches.”
The branch is not the vine.
Neither is there a vine apart from its branches.
One organism.
And if that is true, then the logic of what Jesus says next in the Upper Room is unavoidable, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” If the Father is the vinedresser, and the Son is the vine, and we are branches of that same vine, then the Father cannot love us with anything less than the love with which he loves the Son.
There is no other vine for God to love.
But you.
Indeed, if Jesus has made us members of himself, then whenever the Father looks upon you, he sees his Son. Which means something more astonishing than that “God loves you.” It means you have been taken into the love with which God loves God. It means every baptized believer in your life is likewise loved with the very same love the Father has for the Son.
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“I AM the vine; you are the branches.”
We are all one organism with him.
Adam worships with us from Indiana. At the end of July, he submitted a prayer request for his daughter. Amelia struggled to live in a culture which tells us there is no mystery to reality.
Adam wrote:
“Hello Annandale,
I connect with you via the livestream. This is one of those desperate prayer requests for my daughter currently in ICU. I remember one of Pastor Jason’s sermons where he described Stanley Hauerwas asking for prayer for healing. In the same manner, I’m asking for prayers for healing as well.
— Adam”
On Tuesday, Adam sent another email regarding the prayer list:
“Hello Annandale,
Thank you for your prayers. Sadly my daughter was transferred to the hospice unit and died earlier this morning. Please keep my family in your prayers.”
Sometimes the person to whom it’s difficult to say I will love you on Tuesday at 4:15 is God.
I reached out to Adam on Friday.
He replied:
“Hi Jason,
Thank you for reaching out. I appreciate the prayers for my family, they probably are the best thing people can do at the moment. I’ve been connected to you all for several years now. My daughter, who was twenty-six when she died on Tuesday, has had her share of physical and emotional struggles over the past nine years. Your church— I should say, our church— were a comfort for her at times.. There was more than one time when I forwarded a sermon to her.
As we are about the same age and our kids are also about the same age, I think you understand the story our culture has told them.....or a lack of any coherent Story. And living as if the world does not have a coherent Story shows up in the various struggles they have. She needed to be reminded often that there is a story with a capital S.
It’s really hard to say in an email how much impact this connection has meant, especially now.
Thank you,
Adam”
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When I dropped my friend off at home on Thursday, I got out of my truck and I walked around to the passenger side. I threw my arms around him. I told him I loved him.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
I’m staying put with you.
It was as ordinary an everyday exchange as you can see in the real world. And yet, if we take God at his word, then the arms around him and the voice at his ear were nothing other than Jesus. It was the mystery of reality.
But that mystery does not make us immune to the world!
We are one organism with Jesus. The love with which we are loved is the very same love the Father has for the crucified Son. That we are the branches of him who is the vine means we live exposed to the world no less than him. Even if we do not expect to meet our end on a cross, we cannot expect exemption from fear and finitude, contingency and catastrophe, suffering and death.
Bodies will get sick.
Children do die.
Friends are liable to betray us.
The people to whom we make ourselves available are able to wound us— precisely because we have abided with them long enough to love them.
The mystery of reality is not an escape from it.
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“Mentally, I have hit the “Why is this happening to me?” phase,” my friend texted me last night.
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When the Father sees us, he sees Jesus; therefore, we can be bold in our prayers. We can petition him as unabashedly as co-participants in providence. We can plead for healing. We can ask for the cup before us to be moved. But the love with which we are also loved is a love that did not keep Christ from the cross.
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“I AM the vine; you are the branches…As the Father loves me so I love you.”
If the mystery of reality does not provide us an escape from it, the mystery does nevertheless make us a promise.
Near the end of this essay “The Community of the Resurrection,” Robert Jenson follows the logic of the gospel to its most audacious conclusion. “The church is the body of the resurrected Jesus,” he writes, “but we its members are not yet risen.”
Not yet.
For now, we remain vulnerable bodies inside history. Bodies that receive diagnoses. Bodies that bury children. Bodies that can still ask, “Why is this happening to me?” But if the risen LORD has chosen to have no other body than this mystical body, then Jesus’ own full and ultimate glorification is somehow “at stake” in what finally becomes of us.
If he is the vine and we are the branches, then Christ’s final glory will remain incomplete without his whole risen body. That is, if Jesus has identified himself with us so completely that we are branches of his one life, then our graves are no longer merely our concern.
Jesus has implicated himself in your future.
Jesus has a stake in Amelia’s future.
Jesus has a stake in Grace’s future.
Jesus has a stake in my friend’s future.
As Jenson writes:
“The church is the body of the risen one, but we its members are not yet risen. Until we are, as the LORD has no other body than the one we make, his own future is at stake. He must insist before the Father, “As I am risen and live forever with death behind me, they too must rise.”
The Father’s love will not keep you from the cross. The good news— the promise of the gospel— is that the Father’s love will not leave you there. In the meantime, you are not alone. It is hard indeed to say (and harder still to mean it), “I will love you next Tuesday at 4:15.” Nevertheless! Week in and week out, Jesus promises, “I will love next Sunday, around 11:30– whenever the preacher finishes his sermon— through the bread that is my body and the wine that is my blood.”
“Abide in my love,” Jesus says.
Stay put.
Jesus obeys his own command.
He abides.
Here.
In loaf and cup.
The mystery of reality is not an escape from it.
But it is a visible, tangible promise that, no matter what reality takes from you, the LORD himself has no future apart from you.
