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How many of you have gone through periods when things in & around your life seem like they will never stop changing? They can be good changes or bad changes. I remember the month I graduated from college my best friend also graduated magna cum laude, and celebrated his 21st birthday, and got married. I was just a tad bit jealous of him, but I also realized that’s a lot of change for one month. I know some of you who have had periods of going back and forth between no work and too much work and back again. Others have gone through a period when people you are very close to keep dying. Still others have the same experience with their own health; first it gets worse, then better, then worse again. Sometimes it happens all at once: you lose your job, then your car gets totaled in an accident; then you need physical therapy but your health insurance went the way of your job.
Jesus’ disciples were going through a period like that. Just a few years earlier Jesus had called them to follow him. Most of them had left their jobs; at the very least they spent less time with their families; they gained a new purpose to their lives; and they were given new focus in their relationship with the world. Now Jesus has gathered them for a last meal together because he senses that the end of his life is near. He knew that his death would create another huge period of change in their lives.
In this morning’s passage, known as the Farewell Discourse for obvious reasons, Jesus was trying to help them prepare for and respond to this giant new change that was about to take place in their lives. At one level change always evokes resistance in human beings. Even when we say we like change, there are elements of resistance that pervade our lives in the midst of big changes. Jesus was very realistic about resistance. He didn’t see it as all bad or as all good. He wasn’t surprised by it, & he didn’t want the disciples to be either. In fact, one could say that responding to resistance is resurrection work. Jesus was preparing the disciples to do that particular part of the work of resurrection.
Today’s passage comes right in the middle of the Farewell Discourse. Both before and after this section Jesus focuses on the sorrow and anxiety that his absence would cause them. But here he focuses on two new realities that would become regular parts of their lives – one internal and one external. He calls the new internal reality pruning: “every branch that bears fruit is pruned to make it bear more fruit.” He calls the new external reality persecution: “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you... Neither pruning nor persecution was completely new to the disciples – they had already experienced both to some extent. But now they were going to be facing them without Jesus being physically present when they happened.
We all have a pretty good idea of what persecution is, whether we’ve experienced it personally or simply read or heard about other people being persecuted; but what about pruning? In horticulture, gardeners know that they have to keep pruning the bush, the rose, the vine, to keep it healthy. You sacrifice twenty potential buds and new shoots in order that the two or three that remain may grow strong and produce much better flowers and fruit than would otherwise have happened. As someone who is not much of a gardener, I find myself resisting the waste of it: all that potential life, all those potential flowers, being ruthlessly cut off.
I find that most of us resist spiritual pruning in the same way. Spiritual pruning involves cutting out some things from our lives which may be good in themselves and which would in principle have had the potential to develop into fruit bearing branches. Pruning also involves cutting out parts that have turned negative even though they might have started out as good or necessary. We no longer need them, and they might be doing us harm. Defense mechanisms are good examples of these. As children we learn ways to cope and survive – like pretending it doesn’t hurt when someone says something hurtful to us. But as we grow up those coping strategies are no longer needed, and if we cling to them, they keep us from the very intimacy to which Jesus invites us. But whether we’re talking about too many good parts or parts that have turned negative because they’re hurting our growth, the pruning-knife cuts them out so that other things may flourish. Pruning is always painful & threatening. That’s why we resist it. When it does happen, it’s important to grieve the losses involved. But Jesus indicates that the vine dresser – the very source of love – is never closer to the vine, never more intimately concerned with it, than when wielding the pruning-knife.
Resistance to pruning is a fact of life. We’re going to resist, whether we like it or not. The challenge is to resist in ever healthier ways. Some unhealthy ways for adults to resist are to deny reality, to blame ourselves or others, and to repress our true emotions because we think they are unacceptable. Once again, those forms of resistance may have been necessary at an earlier stage of life. Children who experienced abuse had to deny reality in order to survive. The psychological term for it is “disassociation.” Sometimes it involves separating “me” from my body. It often leads to repressing the memory of the experience because it is too overwhelming to face at a child’s stage of development. Children don’t decide to disassociate or repress a memory. Their minds and bodies do that by themselves.
But as we grow up, we need to realize that we now can access the psychological and spiritual resources to face the memories. That is how we become more fruitful. Even that doesn’t mean we are necessarily ready today. Healthy resistance for adults sometimes involves postponing pruning until we are in a better emotional space. Even mere acknowledgment that we are resisting can be healthy. Eventually, however, we have to face the pruning-knife.
The distinction between healthy & unhealthy resistance doesn’t only apply to the internal threat of the pruning-knife. It also applies to external threats that evoke resistance. We usually experience as threats any change in the conditions of life, or the expectations that others place on us. The mere anticipation of Jesus’ absence came as a threat to the disciples. But Jesus goes on to speak of persecution. Persecution is a specific kind of external threat that involves opposition – whether physical violence or verbal abuse. It's at least as true in justice-making as in teaching or psychotherapy: the work starts where the resistance starts. If we're not encountering any resistance, then we have to ask ourselves whether we've confused the Gospel of Jesus with our culture's rules for respectability. John's community knew it. Israel's exiles hearing God's prophetic word in Isaiah about their being the vine knew it. The new life that God brings comes in the midst of powers that are hostile to it.
But persecution isn’t the only form of external threat. We also feel threatened when someone tries to impose something on us. When someone tries to get us to accept something we are not ready for, they are imposing their ideas on us. Even a good idea that comes from outside can come at a bad time. Surely you’ve had some one try to give you good advice that simply came at the wrong time? You may even recognize it as good advice; but it infuriates you that they are offering it at that moment. It can be healthy to resist such advice.
That’s why the best therapists are those who understand that each of us have most of the resources we need for our own healing and growth inside us. I believe that’s what Jesus meant when he said, “you have already been pruned by the word that I have spoken to you.” The “word” that Jesus spoke to them mostly came in the form of parables. Parables do not impose ideas. They create space. They invite reflection. They encourage us to access our internal resources.
It may surprise us to call working with our resistance “resurrection work.” In the church I grew up in as a young Christian, Easter and Resurrection were about success. They still are. Having lines out the door to get in to Easter worship; testimonies of success attributed to God in peoples’ lives; everything running smoothly in the church – all those signs of God’s goodness. And they look pretty good to me. But in the Bible, Jesus’ followers experienced resurrection more often as a threat that evokes resistance than a victory that leads to success. Poets like the Guatemalan Julia Esquivel know that. She wrote a poem that became the title of a book called, “Threatened with Resurrection.” She describes the word that has pruned us. According to Julia,
The Word, for our sake, became poverty clothed as the poor who live off the refuse heap. The Word, for our sake, became a sob a thousand times stifled in the immovable mouth of the child who died from hunger. The Word, for our sake, became danger in the anguish of the mother who worries about her child growing into adulthood.The Word cut us deeply in that place of shame: the painful reality of the poor. The Word blew its spirit over the dried bones of the churches, guardians of silence. The Word awoke us from the lethargy which had robbed us of our hope. The Word became a path in the jungle, a decision on the farm, love in women, unity among workers, & a Star for those few who can inspire dreams. The Word became Light, the Word became History, and the Word became Conflict.Those are parabolic words that allow us to work with our resistance to external threats in healthy ways. Prophetic action is the biblical form that healthy resistance takes. But not everything that goes in the name of prophetic action is healthy. Much so-called prophetic action is reactionary. It hasn’t passed through the pruning process. People talk about counting to ten before acting. Hopefully some of what happens while we are counting to ten is to pay attention to our own pruning and our own resistance, and how the thing we are getting ready to protest is true in our own lives. That doesn’t mean we don’t protest it. Prophets didn’t wait until they had their own lives together before they spoke truth to power. But in their most effective expressions they spoke with a humility that comes from self-reflection.
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