Canter Bridge

Jesus’ agricultural metaphors are both vivid and harsh. A vineyard keeper doesn’t wince at every stroke of his knife. He does not sentimentalize his vines, else he’d make little wine.

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.

The formal difference in the Greek words translated as removes (airei) and prunes (kathairei) is a mere preposition, a modestly elided form of kata. Yet the experience of the respective branches could hardly be more remote. One is thrown into the fire, the other made more productive. Destruction and production are the two fates.

When Jesus’ rhetoric shifts from the metaphorical to the more closely descriptive, we glimpse what he is getting at. He wants a mutual interpenetration between his disciple and himself, the closest association, an enduring domiciling in the same space. This is the secret to fruitful survival, a fate that is filled out in terms of loving, keeping commandments, glorifying one’s Father, and the like.

Yet it is difficult to get past the hurdle of that preposition. From one angle, being discarded and being pruned are both functions of the vinedressers cutting. Presumably, we are left to understand that both entail pain and the curtailment of random growth. In the latter case, ramshackle, willy-nilly stretching towards the sun is supplanted by something more purposeful.

Yet the knife does not go away.