The Vine and the Branches by Colleen O’Sullivan

The Vine and the Branches by Colleen O’Sullivan

Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter

Some who had come down from Judea were instructing the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the Mosaic practice, you cannot be saved.”  (Acts 15:1)

I rejoiced because they said to me,
“We will go up to the house of the LORD.”
And now we have set foot
within your gates, O Jerusalem.  (Psalm 122:1-2)

I am the vine; you are the branches.  Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. (John 15:5)

Piety

O Lord, help us to remain in you, for you provide the only real and true sustenance for life.

Study

Just two Wednesdays ago, the first reading showed the young Church spreading out from Jerusalem.  Granted, people fled the city in desperation because of severe persecution.  But very quickly there was cause for rejoicing at Philip’s successes in evangelizing the people in Samaria.  The Church had begun to grow!

And now just seven chapters further on in the Acts of the Apostles, we read how those early Christians have begun arguing among themselves.  No longer merely rejoicing over bringing new people to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, they find themselves divided about just who can be part of the Body of Christ and by what means.   The people who had come from the Jewish faith believed that to become Christians, men should be circumcised just as they and their ancestors had been.  By then, however, a significant number of converts were coming from Gentile backgrounds.   Was it fair to require them to go through a ritual that came from the Mosaic faith?   Amazing how fast we human beings can find something to argue about!

How the fledgling Church resolves this will be seen in Friday’s first lectionary reading.  However, today’s Gospel reading holds an answer that I like to hold onto in its simplicity.  We are the branches solidly rooted in the Vine.  As long as that’s where we find our roots, then we are a part of Christ’s Church.  It doesn’t matter where you come from, what language you speak, who your mother and father were, how much money you have, or what kind of clothes you wear.  As long as you remain anchored in the Vine that is the Lord, you are part of the Body of Christ. 

I’m not surprised that it took so little time for the first Christians to fall to arguing among themselves.  When I look around today, without meaning to be, we are often very divisive in the labels we slap on others as though they are value judgments.  We call some conservative, others liberal.  We divide people by whether they prefer to receive Communion in the hand or on the tongue.  We disparage others if they don’t enjoy the same type of church music we do.  The list just goes on and on.

Action

When you are praying today, picture Jesus looking from Heaven at his Church both in the early days referred to in the Book of Acts and today.  Do you think Jesus wanted only uniform branches, or possibly do you think Jesus might delight in the variety of flowers and fruit that stem from the Vine in every generation?