“Jesus
said to his disciples:
‘I
am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. 2 He cuts away every branch of mine that
doesn’t produce fruit.’”
What
do we make of the portion of verse 2 highlighted above? It seems pretty tough.
And how do we reconcile it with God’s loving nature? Several things are worth
thinking about. Let’s start with two of them.
First
of all, we can’t dismiss it as a divine typo. It is consistent with the
passages of the Jewish Bible Jesus seems to be alluding to. See Psalm
80 and Isaiah
5. It is also consistent with what He
said elsewhere. See Luke
13:6-8. Indeed, Jesus drives home the same point later in the same passage
we’re considering here. See John
15:6.
Second,
it actually is motivated by love. God
wants us to be fruitful so we can deliver His love and goodness to others. Others
suffer if we fail to do that, and God loves them too much to let His people
contribute to that. And make no mistake about it; our failure to be fruitful
hurts others. So God is acting in love when He moves an unfruitful believer out
of the way.
Let
me illustrate that by last year’s garden. We planted a bed of tomatillos in the
spring and several beds of beets in mid-August.
By early September it was clear
that neither were as productive as they should have been. The tomatillos were
played out and significant portions of the beet beds were growing weeds instead
of beets.
If
we would have let that continue those spaces would have been wasted and we
would have generated less food for the hungry. Instead, we pulled the
tomatillos, tilled under the weeds, and planted mustard greens. That resulted
in several hundreds pounds of produce where there would have been none and
beauty where there would have been decay:
Viewed
in that light, God’s practice of cutting “away every branch … that doesn’t
produce fruit” is an act of love that blesses far more folks than it hurts.
Well,
that’s it for now. More later.
