In today’s gospel reading, we are transported back to the night before Jesus’s crucifixion and death. In an extended discourse, he offers his disciples comfort and reassurance. Though they do not yet understand, he knows what lies ahead, and what his dear friends will need to get through it - love. In washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus gives them a glimpse of what love looks like - it’s messy, and requires humility, and shows up not so much in flowery, heartfelt words, but through action.
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| Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash |
On this night, Jesus gives his disciples a powerful reassurance, a powerful promise: that he loves them. On the night he will be separated from them - by arrest, and then by death - Jesus reminds the disciples that their connection to him is much deeper than physical presence. Like a branch connected to a vine, the disciples are connected to Jesus, who gives them life and enables them to bear fruit.
We, too, are branches of that same vine. Because of this relationship, this connection, the love that flows through the Father and the Son also flows through us, and out from us into the world in the fruit we bear. This fruit is the love we share with one another - acts of care and service and sacrifice.
While love is commanded here, we are reminded that it’s first given to us as a promise. “This is my commandment,” Jesus says, “that you love one another as I have loved you.” God’s love has come to us first - not because of how kind or loving or good we are, not because of how hard we try, but because we belong to God, who is love.
God chooses us, and clings to us. In being connected to the vine, we are connected to this life-giving, empowering love. It is in this love that we abide. It is in this love that we rest and find a home.
In her essay on today’s gospel text, Episcopal writer Debi Thomas so beautifully describes the promise of this connection: “My problem is that I often treat Jesus as a role model, and then despair when I can’t live up to his high standards. But abiding in something is not the same as emulating it. In the vine-and-branches metaphor, Jesus’s love is not our example; it’s our source. It’s where our love originates and deepens. Where it replenishes itself. In other words, if we don’t abide, we can’t love. Jesus’s commandment to us is not that we wear ourselves out, trying to conjure love from our own easily depleted resources. Rather, it’s that we abide in the holy place where divine love becomes possible. That we make our home in Jesus’s love — the most abundant and inexhaustible love in existence.”
I imagine that many of us are feeling exhausted these days - tired of living in uncertainty, wearied by physical and emotional burdens, worn down by constant vigilance, longing for a return to normalcy. Perhaps a command to love - with the self-sacrifice and difficulty it entails - feels impossibly burdensome; yet another thing to add to a long to-do list.
Hear again these words of promise, which are for you. Jesus’s love is for you. You have been chosen! You belong to God! The love that is already yours is bearing fruit in and through you.
When our own strength and love are depleted, we are nourished by God's never-failing presence and abundant love.
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