Abstract
John 15:1-8, with 1 John 4:7-21
Abiding isn’t a word that we tend to reach for in everyday conversation. We don’t tend to say to a friend, ‘oh, just abide here for a moment whilst I pop into Sainsbury’s’, or ‘she abode with me on the platform until the train arrived’. It’s a word we mainly come across in our hymns, accompanied by phrasing like ‘fast falls the eventide’.
As I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this word in preparing this sermon, I’ve come to think that it’s actually rather a shame that it’s a word that doesn’t get more of an airing in our day to day lives. Because I think it has a lot to teach us about how to live as Christians – and, more particularly, about how to live with one another as Christians.
Abiding seems to me to offer an answer to – or at least a way forward through – the problem that jumped out to me when I read the passage from John 15 alongside the verses from 1 John. It’s the sting in the tail end of 1 John 4: ‘Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or a sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.’
This verse poses a problem for me – and perhaps for you too – because there are people in the church who I just don’t love. It’s tempting to soften this and say instead that I just find it hard to love them – or that of course I love the people, I just hate some of the things they do. But, if I’m honest, there are people in whom I just don’t see much to value. Of whom I find myself thinking: ‘Why are they here? What good are they doing? Why can’t they just make everything better by going away?’ So I think that truthfully what I feel towards these people is not love – it’s possibly even something closer to hate.
This failure to love often feels perfectly justifiable, even righteous. After all, the reason I generally don’t love brothers or sisters in the church is because they seem to me to cause damage to the church. They are often people who seem to stir up fear – including fear of punishment – and to prevent the flourishing of others (including many people that I do, in fact, love). This all means that my problem is not just that I don’t love them – it’s that I also struggle to see why I should.
Yet 1 John 4:20–21 doesn’t seem to offer me the wiggle room of these reasons why I shouldn’t have to love these people. It’s pretty implacable about God’s command: ‘those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.’
How, then, might the language of abiding help us out?
The image of the vine points us on our way through this quagmire. I’ve tended to read the opening verses of John 15 as primarily speaking about the individual’s relationship to Christ, with the branches standing for the individual’s virtues and vices, to be cultivated and pruned respectively. But that’s to downplay the irreducibly communal dynamics going on in this passage. Reading these verses together with 1 John (and in the light of the command that follows in John 15 to love one another), helps us to see that the vine does not just stand as a metaphor for each of our relationships to God, but also tells us something about how our relationship to God gathers us into a common life. We are the branches, bound to one another by the relationship we share with Christ.
My own ability to flourish and be fruitful is bound up, then, with that of all the other branches. And this seems to be true to our experience of life in the church to an extent (for instance, when it comes to Diocesan finances, to take an unromantic example.) But this isn’t just a description of the reality that an individual’s actions inevitably have communal consequences. It’s also an imperative – an ethical command. The way we properly abide in the vine/in God, we are told, is by loving one another. This isn’t just an add on to the primary command to love God: this is how we love God – how we abide in God.
We know this isn’t simple to do, of course. And especially when other Christians seem to be acting in a way that doesn’t seek the good of all the branches.
Nonetheless, we are called to abide with one another. Abiding can’t just be boiled down to waiting or sticking around – we’re not just being called to wait for those who are a bit slow to catch up what we’ve already understood. Rather, abiding is a full and personal commitment to another – a deep form of solidarity. We are called to bear with – to abide – with one another in our stumbling and flawed attempts to love one another.
And we’re promised that as we’re rooted ever deeper into the life of God’s love and of God’s kingdom, those bits that fall short of love are pruned and refined. It’s hard to imagine what it will be like to be refined of all that is not love – to be free of all our fears and self-preoccupations. But what we do know is that all that abides – all that lasts and remains – will be love.
Another way of putting this is that what will remain is our ability to be loved by God. To learn to abide is to learn to live in a gaze of pure love. And, as we learn to abide in God’s love (through the Spirit who abides in us), we also learn to see our siblings in the church more truthfully (c.f. v20). Learning to see them means seeing that they are also caught up in God’s loving gaze. That they are to God a cause of endless delight. And learning to see another as beloved by God allows us to catch sight of ourselves anew as also beloved. More than this, it allows us to catch a fuller glimpse of God – who is not just a God who loves people like me.
None of this means we’ll cease to find our siblings in the church difficult to love, nor that we’ll suddenly all agree on things – perhaps not even on what it is that love demands. But it does mean that through abiding with one another we will be drawn more deeply into the life of Christ, the true vine.