Pruned for life

In today’s homily, I reflected on the profound metaphor of the vine, a symbol deeply rooted in our faith. Despite my own struggles with gardening, I’ve come to appreciate the spiritual parallels of cultivation. Just as vines require careful pruning to bear fruit, so too must we allow God to trim away the unfruitful parts of our lives. I shared insights on the importance of staying connected to our community and to God, drawing from the rich imagery of vineyards and fruit trees. It’s through this connection that we find the nourishment to grow and flourish. I encourage you all to embrace the pruning process, trusting in God’s care, as we prepare for a season of new life and spiritual growth.

(00:00:00) – There is one thing that is absolutely certain about my life, and that’s I’m not a gardener. I am very good at killing plants, but not so good at actually nurturing them or allowing them to come to full to full birth. Which is also strange, because when I was a seminarian, we had to work a couple of days a week to support ourselves, and the only job that I could find was that of an indoor plant hire company specialist. So we’d go in and polish the leaves and take the temperature and work out how much water that much I could kind of do, but the rest not so much. I didn’t grow up in a vineyard. Did you grow up on a farm? We had cattle more than crops. But, we did have some fruit trees. And I remember dad always saying how crucial it was every year during the winter to make sure that those fruit trees were pruned back. And I think I saw the evidence of that many years later when I went on a camping trip up the Hawkesbury River with some mates from church, a whole bunch of us, in fact.

(00:01:21) – And we came across this old abandoned orchard, and it was just full of these trees that were just overflowing with fruit. And we thought it was amazing, you know, finding all this fruit. But because there was so much fruit, it was all pretty much just off and rotten. And because you need that cultivation, you need someone to be going in and cutting those branches back. Because if there’s too many branches, none of the tree is able to really receive the light, the nurturance, the water, the, the, the nourishment that it needs. And so you don’t get the best of the tree, you don’t get the best of the crop. And so everything suffers as a result of that. And vineyards are much the same. You need to tend very carefully during the winter, make sure that you cut back those parts of the branch that aren’t going to maximise the best fruit for that plant. The Jewish people knew this. They had cultivated vines for thousands of years, and the people that had lived in the land before them, they knew those tricks.

(00:02:40) – They were well aware of that. And particularly in a place like Israel where the land isn’t very productive and fruitful, it’s very dry and barren and rocky. And so you need to be even more careful than in a place of abundance to make sure that the plants that you do have produce the very best of the fruit. And so this image of the vine is, is one that is used regularly in the Hebrew Scriptures, for example in Psalm 79 or 80. You get this image of the whole of Israel as this beautiful vineyard, this vine that has been transplanted from the slavery of Egypt into this new place. And the Lord is very tenderly caring for it and nurturing it, and making sure that this vine was able to produce abundant fruit, because that’s what God has always been after. He’s made us to be his covenant people. He’s invited us into this relationship with him. He wants us to be this community that is able to be the image bearers of God, and to remind the world about the wonder of God, to point creation back to God, and to point the goodness of God back into the community and people around us.

(00:04:03) – But as Psalm 80 or as Isaiah five, another song of the servant, the song of the the vineyard kind of remind us the so often Israel failed in that call to be a good vine, to be fruitful, to be a source of abundance for the world, because it’s never just about us. It’s never just about my relationship with God. So often Catholics are guilty of that. They just think, as long as I go to church and as long as I do what I need to do and cultivate my own private devotional life with God, that’s enough. But now the Lord is saying, no. It’s as part of this whole vineyard that we find our life in our fruitfulness. For without me, you can do nothing. Jesus will say he’s inviting us into that experience. In two ways that we ought to remain with him in that sense of personally being connected to God. Making time to be with God in prayer, allowing the Lord to cultivate that faith and that relationship, making sure that we indeed live the most productive and fruitful life that we possibly can.

(00:05:24) – Not in a sense of perfectionism or any sense of us just wanting to strive under our own steam and according to our own efforts, a bit of a God who is faithful to us, the God who is just longing that we might experience his goodness and his kindness. The God who is, who’s wanting us to be able to find that life in God. But the second sense of that is that the whole of Israel is imaged as divine. And so it is an image of the community, of the church itself. And so we need to cultivate that relationship within the church, that it’s only when we remain connected both to God and to the community and to the people and to the church, that we find our full flourishing. There’s an old saying that we find in the mediaeval church, Solus Christians is nulus Christiana. To be a Christian by yourself is to be nothing is to be no Christian. You can’t really ever find yourself your identity, your purpose by yourself. You might for a while be able to continue that life with God.

(00:06:40) – But we’ve all seen that this family members have drifted away from the practice of their faith, as people have, through various reasons and often very legitimate reasons, decided that they can no longer be part of of this community and they begin to try and do things by themselves. It works for a while, but bit by bit, their life of faith is slowly drained away. Their fruitfulness and their ability to be a source of life and love and goodness within the world begins to dissipate. They might produce some fruit, but it’s certainly not the abundance of wonderful, beautiful fruit that the Lord is seeking for us. Today we are invited to remain firmly grafted to the Lord, to allow the Lord to, with great intimacy, to draw near to us, to see us, to see all those parts of my life that really do need, with a bit of pruning that no longer is serving me well, there is no more intimate and experience than allowing our God to come to us with that sharp knife, to come with those secateurs, to start looking at those parts of our life that are no longer fruitful, that are no longer productive, that are no longer giving the glory to God that we want to give.

(00:08:11) – And God, with knife in hand, will come to us. He will be someone who is gentle with us. There will be times when there’s a bit of hacking kind of required, but it’s always knowing that it’s about love. It’s about that full flourishing that he so longs for us to experience and to have. So let’s allow the Lord to draw near with that knife and to start pruning away. Start cutting those things that don’t let us be the people that he’s called us and created us to be. Let’s continue this season of Easter by allowing God to call us into that fullness of life. If we long for the Holy Spirit to come at Pentecost, if we long for that release to flow within us so that we can find our true purpose and identity in God, then we need to do the work now of letting go of those things that are not of God, that are not fruitful, that are not helpful, things that cultivate death rather than life. Let’s allow the Lord to do that work so that we can indeed be the fruitful people that God has called us and created us to be, that we might spend these next few weeks of the season of Easter in joyful anticipation, waiting for that outpouring of his love and allowing the work of the Holy Spirit to cleanse and bring us new life and fresh birth so that we can indeed be his people.

(00:09:43) – To welcome others and to share the joy of the vine and the share, indeed the fruit of the vine with those around us.