Abiding in the Vine
Notes
Transcript
2 Every branch in me that does not produce fruit he removes, and he prunes every branch that produces fruit so that it will produce more fruit.
Fruitfulness is the result of the Son’s life being reproduced in a disciple. The disciple’s part is to remain. The word remain, a key word in John’s theology, is menō which occurs 11 times in this chapter, 40 times in the entire Gospel, and 27 times in John’s epistles. What does it mean to remain? It can mean, first, to accept Jesus as Savior (cf. 6:54, 56). Second, it can mean to continue or persevere in believing (8:31 [“hold” is remain]; 1 John 2:19, 24). Third, it can also mean believing, loving obedience (John 15:9–10). Without faith, no life of God will come to anyone. Without the life of God, no real fruit can be produced: Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in Me.
Jesus is the vine; his disciples are the branches.
The branches derive their life from the vine; the vine produces its fruit through the branches.
The role of the Father, the heavenly gardener, is twofold.
First, the Father (Jesus says) cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, i.e. he gets rid of the dead wood so that the living, fruit-bearing branches may be sharply distinguished from them, and may have more room for growth.
Fruitfulness is an infallible mark of true Christianity; the alternative is dead wood, These have no life in them; they have never borne fruit, or else they would have been pruned, not cut off.
Because Jesus is the true vine, in contradistinction to the vine of Israel that bore either no fruit or rotten fruit, it is impossible to think that any branch that bears no fruit can long be considered part of him: his own credentials as the true vine would be called in question as fundamentally as the credentials of Israel. Cf. further on v. 6.
If we must think of ‘branches’ with real contact with Jesus, we need go no further than Judas Iscariot (cf. notes on 6:70–71; 13:10). Indeed, there is a persistent strand of New Testament witness that depicts men and women with some degree of connection with Jesus, or with the Christian church, who nevertheless by failing to display the grace of perseverance finally testify that the transforming life of Christ has never pulsated within them (e.g. Mt. 13:18–23; 24:12; Jn. 8:31ff.; Heb. 3:14–19; 1 Jn. 2:19; 2 Jn. 9).
Second, he prunes every branch that does bear fruit.
The Greek displays a play on words that is hard to render in English. The Father ‘cuts off’ (airei) every dead branch; he ‘trims’ (kathairei) every fruit-bearing branch; indeed the disciples listening to Jesus are already ‘clean’ (katharoi, v. 3) because of the word Jesus has spoken to them.
The verb kathairei and its cognate adjective katharoi are appropriate to both an agricultural (cf. Barrett, p. 473) and a moral or religious context.
No fruit-bearing branch is exempt. Doubtless the Father’s purpose is loving—it is so that each branch will be even more fruitful—but the procedure may be painful. The thought is not unlike Hebrews 12:4–11, cast in terms of another model: the Lord disciplines his own the way a father disciplines his children. All this is ‘for our good, that we may share in his holiness’ (Heb. 12:10).
Charles R. Wood:
I. The Process of Pruning
Most of us already know too much about this
A. God uses people to prune us
1. This involves all the ugly things people do to us and say about us
2. These are often people who themselves have not developed the fruit of the Spirit that we are working on developing
B. God uses problems to prune us
1. The problems that we bring on ourselves
2. The problems that come upon us outside our control—we are dealing here with the circumstances of life
C. God uses pressures to prune us
1. This has to do with the ways in which we respond to problems
2. There is a sense in which all pressure is self-created
II. The Purpose of Pruning
1. God has purposes for everything He allows to come our way
2. Nothing comes by accident or “happenstance”
3. “Surely your wrath against men brings you praise”
4. The more we accept His working, the more it accomplishes, and the more quickly it is over
5. Pruning contributes to the productivity of our lives and ministries
6. The Purpose —fruit, more fruit, much fruit
III. Mistakes Regarding Pruning
A. Pruning is punishment
1. It is clear from Hebrews 12:4–11 that this is not so
2. Our punishment was taken by Him on the cross
3. Chastening is simply part the pruning process (the dead branches)
B. Pruning is permanent
1. We think the branches will never grow again, the loss permanent
2. Pruning is done so that more fruit will be produced
3. There is an end to pruning or the plant is destroyed, which is never God’s intention
C. Pruning is passive
1. God prunes out the dead branches
2. God also prunes the living branches (He sometimes cuts back something we consider very productive)
3. Our refusal to accept what He is doing can cause us to miss productivity
3 You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you.
The disciples had been cleansed by Jesus and His message, but one, Judas, was not cleansed (cf. 13:10–11).
15:3. The cleansing power of the word Jesus has spoken to his disciples, then, is equivalent to the life of the vine pulsating through the branches. Jesus’ word (logos) is not assigned magical power. What is meant, rather, is that Jesus’ ‘teaching’ (as logos is rendered in 14:23), in its entirety, including what he is and what he does (since he himself is the logos incarnate, 1:1, 14), has already taken hold in the life of these followers (cf. notes on 13:10).
4 Remain in me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me.
15:4. The first sentence of v. 4 can be taken in one of three ways; all of them make sense.
(1) Conditional: ‘If you remain in me, I will remain in you’ (which is the assumption of the niv’s rendering). Read in this way, the believer’s perseverance in remaining in Jesus is the occasional cause, not the ultimate cause, of Jesus’ remaining in the believer (cf. 8:31–32; 15:9–11).
(2) Comparison: ‘Remain in me, as I remain in you’ (the Greek allows this: the second clause has no verb, but simply ‘and I in you’). The thought is coherent enough; the ‘and’ (as opposed to ‘as’) is mildly surprising. In the context of the threats on both sides of the verse, it is indefensible to take the ‘I in you’ as an absolute promise regardless of the perseverance or fickleness of the ostensible believer. (
3) Mutual imperative: ‘Let us both remain in each other’, ‘Let there be mutual indwelling’. Again, however, the syntax is strange: the strong second person imperative in the first clause cannot easily be reduced to this mutual exhortation, and the normal Greek way of expressing this thought is by a hortatory subjunctive.
If the first reading, the conditional, has a slight edge, the general thought is in any case clear. No branch has life in itself; it is utterly dependent for life and fruitfulness on the vine to which it is attached. The living branch is thus truly ‘in’ the vine; the life of the vine is truly ‘in’ the branch. Lest the point be missed, Jesus steps away from the vine imagery a little and directly addresses his hearers (though he preserves the figure of ‘fruit’):
Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. This is not the inorganic growth of external accretion, like the growth of an alum crystal in an alum solution; it is organic growth, internal growth, driven by the pulsating life of the vine in the branch, and only this kind of growth produces fruit. The imagery of the vine is stretched a little when the ‘branches’ are given the responsibility to remain in the vine, but the point is clear: continuous dependence on the vine, constant reliance upon him, persistent spiritual imbibing of his life—this is the sine qua non of spiritual fruitfulness.
The Christian or Christian organization that expands by external accretion, that merely apes Christian conduct and witness, but is not impelled by life within, brings forth dead crystals, not fruit.
in 1 John ‘to remain in’ language and ‘to be in’ language are associated with new covenant theology. If the same is true here, as has been argued,4 we are not far from the Old Testament new covenant texts, all of which promise a renewed heart or a right mind or the presence of the Spirit in the new covenant people, such that they will obey what God says.
Thus God remains among and in his people by renewing them with his life, with his Spirit, and making his presence known in them and among them (cf. 14:16, 23); they remain in him by obeying his commands, as the explanation in 15:9–11 makes clear.
