Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington
Readings – Acts 8: 28-40; John 15: 1-11
“I am the vine – you are the branches.”
Just as it is today, the Holy Land of Biblical times was great winegrowing country. The terminology of winegrowing is a frequent part of Jesus’ parables and teaching, and indeed large sections of both the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, the grapevine was often a metaphor for the Jewish people.
The Baptism Of The Eunuch (1626), by Rembrandt. Hangs in the Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, Netherlands.
The language of the vine and the branches in the Gospel reading is so rich, that it is easy to ignore our reading from Acts this morning – and nobody wants to preach about eunuchs in case children in the congregation ask awkward questions. But Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch is tremendously important to the revolution in thought that clearly affected the apostles in the years after the Resurrection. This shift in mindset is all about who could be considered one of God’s chosen people. Acts records it as being clearly directed by the Holy Spirit.
The “Ethiopian” is, of course, a foreigner from a long way away; in fact, he’s described as a court official of the Candace, who was the ruler of the great city of Meroë, located in the present day Sudan. He was probably much darker-skinned than the people in the Holy Land, but that will have mattered much less in the Ancient world, which was much less race-obsessed than we are.
Although we often hear that to be a Jew, you have to be born a Jew, this isn’t actually the case. People from Gentile backgrounds can and did convert to Judaism in Biblical times, and they do so today. As this Ethiopian “had come to Jerusalem to worship”, he was clearly interested in the God of the Jews. The thing that ensured that he could never convert to Judaism wasn’t that he was a foreigner, but that he was a eunuch. That prohibition dated back to Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The Ethiopian was reading from the second part of the prophecy of Isaiah when Philip approached him, and shortly after the section quoted here, it contained a brief reference to a future time when God would give eunuchs something “better than sons and daughters… an everlasting name that shall not be cut off”. (The reference to things being cut off is, almost certainly in this context, meant to be funny.) Yet writings from contemporary Jewish writers made it clear that prejudice against eunuchs was still very much alive in Judaism at the time of the apostles and that Isaiah’s prophecy was yet to be fulfilled.
So something revolutionary happens when the Ethiopian says, “Look, here is water! What is to stop me being baptised.” The apostles by this stage have no sense of themselves as being anything other than Jews, Jews who believed that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. When Philip baptises the Ethiopian, it is a powerful sign that the followers of Jesus Christwill come not just from the Jewish people but from a myriad of ethnicities and nationalities, and will come even from people who had been forbidden from becoming Jews because of their state in life. This isn’t, for the apostles, a rejection of Judaism, but a clear fulfilment of Jewish prophecy.
This is the second of a long run of stories in the middle part of Acts where we see the followers of Jesus realise that faith in the risen Christ will become truly universal. In the previous passage, three of the apostles preach in Samaria; many of us will remember that the Samaritans and Jews were bitter rivals, perhaps because they both believed in God but disagreed about much else. Then, soon after today’s reading, Peter had a vision of God telling him he was allowed to eat any kind of meat, including the kinds forbidden to Jews. Then he baptised a Roman officer and his entourage after they had a direct encounter with the Holy Spirit. And in this run of stories was the most remarkable boundary-breaking conversion of all, an enemy turned into a brother – Saul, who incited mobs to literally murder some of the first Christians, became a Christian called Paul.
That all sets the context for our more famous Gospel reading about the vine and the branches. If the grapevine was often a Biblical metaphor for the Jewish people, then the story of the Ethiopian eunuch is about a radical broadening of who can be grafted into the vine. It forms part of a cluster of stories that make it clear that nationality, or race, or physical condition, or social status, are no obstacle to being grafted into Jesus, the true vine.
Before writing this sermon, I googled the phrase “grafting branches into a vine”. I found there were lots of pages – and lots of videos – about how to do this for real. I learned that most winegrowers in the world today need to graft their vines, often using techniques that stretch back to the Ancient Mediterranean world. In a graft, a stem with some leaf buds from one vine is attached to the stock of another vine, carefully so that their vascular tissues are lined up, so the sap can flow from the stock to the grafted portion and bring it the nutrients that keep it alive.
If the Church is a metaphorical vine, then the sap that keeps it nourished is God’s love. Now, it’s difficult to define exactly what the Holy Spirit is, but among other things we can say that the Holy Spirit is divine love personified in its purest form. The Holy Spirit is the love that flows between the Father and the Son. That love flows out through the Church and into the world. The thing that unites the Church – because its members don’t always agree on doctrine or politics or much else, as you may have noticed – is the love of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Our Gospel reading comes from a long series of speeches that St John records Jesus giving on His last night with His closest followers, before He went to face His death. He tells the twelve apostles that they cannot bear fruit unless they abide in Him. Just as the Father loved Him, so He loved them, and they were to abide in His love. This was one of his last commands.
The Church should be like a mighty vine, with its branches and tendrils reaching into every tribe and nation. The Church isn’t called to be an organisation, but a living organism. So, why does the reality of the Church so often fall far short of this wonderful vision of an organism transmitting nourishing love from God?
Well, in real life, grapevines aren’t immune from problems either. They can be attacked by pests – and a great epidemic of insects in the 19th Century is why most vines need to be grafted today. Or they can get viruses. Sometimes they get sick and die. Vines also can naturally grow themselves into shapes that mean they bear far less fruit than they should – and that is why they need to be pruned.
The pruning isn’t a comfortable business, involving saws and shears, but is all about enabling the vine to bear more fruit. And sometimes, my dears, that is what I think the bumps and hurts of life are about, about pruning us to bear more fruit, not just in this life, but in the world to come. Somehow, remaining in loving fellowship with one another, despite the way that our individuality and freedom makes bump against one another in ways that cause us pain, is something very important to God’s plans for us. Loving one another, even though love hurts sometimes, is so important that it was one of the last things Christ said to his disciples.
And if we remain in love, then God can use us to break down the barriers that separate us from His love and from one another, just as he used Philip to break down the barrier that kept the Ethiopian eunuch from the family of God. He can even turn enemies into friends, and allow us to see for moments in this life the eternity of universal love that awaits us in heaven.
Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Top banner image: A cross section of an icon of Christ the True Vine, by 16th Century Cretan artist Angelos Akotantos. Hangs in the Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens, Greece.
A metaphor rich sermon.