This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 2; Psalm 110; Joshua 1:1–9; Hebrews 11:32–12:2; John 15:1–16
(See my comments about “abiding” in Christ in John 15:1–11, from April 22, 2020.)
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (“A Song of Praise,” BCP, p. 90); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)
Strength and Courage from the True Vine. When Jesus says, “I am the True Vine” (John 15:1), he evokes so many vivid biblical images. Today we read this passage alongside Joshua 1’s exhortation to be “strong and courageous,” and alongside Hebrews 11’s tribute to those whose faith had made them just that: strong and courageous.
Joshua 1 (and Numbers 14) and the Call to Courage. Forty years prior to Yahweh’s challenge to Joshua to be “strong and courageous,” Joshua had shown exactly this sort of mettle when he and his fellow spies returned from their reconnoitering of the Promised Land. As a kind of first fruit of what that land had to offer, the scouts brought back with them a cluster of grapes so large that it took two men to carry it: “…they…cut down from there a branch with a single cluster of grapes, and they carried it on a pole between two of them” (Numbers 14:22). Ten of the returning twelve scouts were cowed by the challenge of taking the land. Two—Joshua and Caleb—saw the promise. It was as though they could taste already the goodness of the land and the sweetness of the wine that these grapes promised. Because Yahweh had promised to give them the land, Joshua and Caleb had shown fortitude and resolve. Unlike the other ten men, they are ready to move forward. Distrusting that promise, the others displayed cowardice and sloth.
In John’s Gospel, the last of Jesus’s great “I AM” sayings—Jesus’s claim to be “the True Vine”—is a challenge to us to embrace the same kind of resolve that Joshua and Caleb had displayed. In the Eucharistic wine, not only do we “drink the blood” of his sacrifice for our sins, but we celebrate in advance the marriage supper of the Lamb. The Eucharistic wine looks back and it looks forward. We remember our exodus, and we anticipate our entrance into “the glory about to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18). In Jesus, therefore, we find strength and courage to walk by the same sort of faith exemplified in Joshua and by the saints of Hebrews 11—Gideon, Barak, Samson, et al.
Most of all, we find here at the Table of the True Vine the persevering courage to follow Jesus himself, “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2).
John 15 and the Command to Love. Nowhere, perhaps, is such courage and strength more necessary than in finding the capacity to love each other with the love that Jesus commands at the end of today’s passage in John: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you” (John 15:12–14). We are his friends, he says, so our motives are no longer slavish fear of punishment. Now our motives are the genuine confidence of knowing the affection of the one who has called us friend—and who has laid down his life for us. This friend calls us to do for one another what he has done for us.
I am grateful—relational coward that I can be—for examples in my life of people who have loved me this way. I pray that you have friends like that, friends who have shown that “the way of the cross” is “the way of life.” Regardless, our Heavenly Friend—the great “I AM” who has come in sandaled feet—has loved us enough to lay down his life for us. He chose us. We didn’t choose him. And he chose us to be his friends (John 15:15–16). Now he has appointed us, he adds, to bear this fruit: to love others as he has loved us. And so I pray that this next year, God grants all of us the strength and courage to love as we have been loved.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+