Remaining

This is my homily for this weekend, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Cycle B.  The readings for the day are here.


Around our house, one of the first signs of spring, of new life awakening, is when the daffodils come up.  The only thing I know about gardening is that when the grass gets too long I need to mow it.  But my wife Therese has a greener thumb than I do, and somehow she does something every year, or did something once, or something, to make the daffodils appear every spring in one of our flower beds.  I woke up one morning a few days ago to find three daffodils, freshly cut from the garden, in a small vase on our dining room table.  Each of those three blossoms was a delicate yellow “Alleluia”, singing that spring has returned, new life is beginning everywhere, and Jesus is risen from the tomb.  Let all creation sing Alleluia, indeed!

“Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit”.

If you were listening carefully to this evening’s readings, you heard that word “remain” more than once.  It appears in tonight’s Gospel passage from John: “Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit.”  And it also appeared several times in our second reading, from the book known as the first letter of John, which traditionally has been ascribed to the same author as the Gospel.  The author writes, “Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them.”  The “him” in this case is Jesus; if we keep Jesus’s commandments, we remain in him.  In two different readings tonight, we’re being urged to remain in him.

It seems that this word “Remain” is an important one.  We may well ask, ‘What does it mean to remain in him?’.  Some other, older translations of the bible use the word “abide”.  In fact, there is a famous old Christian hymn called “Abide with Me” that you may have heard.  That song is a plea to God not to abandon us, to stay with us, in our hour of darkness and need.  “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide / the darkness deepens, Lord, with me abide.”

If that plea not to be abandoned sounds familiar, we might recall that Jesus asked it of us once, during his hour of need.   In the garden in Gethsemane, he begged us, “Remain here and keep watch with me.”  Did you catch that?  There is that word again: “remain”.  “Remain here and keep watch with me”, during his hour of suffering and dread of all that was about to happen to him.  Well, we didn’t do a very good job of remaining on that occasion; we fell asleep on the job.

So we had commitment issues that particular time, but fortunately for us, Jesus doesn’t.  He is better at this remaining business than we are, and he forgives us, over and over again, just as a lover might forgive a spouse or a partner who has strayed.  He beckons us back, again and again, because he still loves us in spite of everything. 

“Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit.”  Even the preposition, that tiny word “in”, is worth contemplating.  Notice that Jesus isn’t saying, “Whoever remains somewhat close to me, more or less in the same zip code, will bear much fruit.”  No, he’s asking for a closer relationship than that.  He’s not even saying, “Whoever remains next door to me will bear much fruit.”  That’s warmer but still not there.  No, Jesus is saying, “Whoever remains *in* me, and I *in* him, will bear much fruit.”  You can’t get closer than that.  Jesus is telling us that he wants to have a close, personal, intimate relationship with us.

Jesus uses a striking metaphor to illustrate how close he wants us to be with him.  He says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.”  A branch can’t get too far from the vine; in fact, unless the branch is right on the vine, connected to it, with the two as a single organism, it soon dies.  Even those three beautiful yellow daffodil blossoms that were on our dining room table, severed from the rest of their stems and their root systems, didn’t last for more than a week.  They started to shrink and shrivel, and yesterday I threw them away. 

That’s how it goes with flowers after you pick them.  I’ve been married to Therese for nearly thirty years, and we dated for a few years before our wedding.  And I figured out, very early in the relationship, that I could win a lot of points by buying her flowers.  It’s not very original, in fact it’s pretty conventional, maybe even a cliché, but she doesn’t care.  Whenever I come home with a bouquet, whether it’s a fancy arrangement from a florist or something I grabbed from the sale bucket at the supermarket, she acts as though the handsome prince has just come riding up from the palace on his white steed to whisk her away for a romantic adventure. 

And for a few days, the flowers stay beautiful, but then they start to fade, and the petals start to fall, one by one.  You don’t want that to be a metaphor for your relationship, so once you get into the business of giving gifts of flowers, you have to keep it up.  You have to come up with new flowers, fresh flowers.  And then do it again.   That’s actually a better metaphor for how we human beings sustain a relationship, isn’t it? – keep working at it, keep finding ways to make it seem new and fresh and alive.

That’s the best we can do: watch the flowers die, and then buy fresh ones.  But Jesus, the ultimate guy with no commitment issues, the guy who wants to be with us now and tomorrow and forever, takes it to a whole different level.  He is the vine, and he wants us to be the branches.  He doesn’t want us to get picked.  He wants us to stay connected with him, to stay attached to him, today, tomorrow and always.  And as long as we do that, as long as we stay attached to Jesus, there is no withering and fading and dying.  There is life, in abundance.   We’re daffodils that will bloom, and bloom again, and bloom some more, day after day, season after season, year after year.  And then each of us will be a little alleluia in our own right, singing praise to the one who sets us free from death by offering us new life.  If only we are willing to let him remain in us, and we in him.