Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter (B), Vigil

May 1, 2021

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.1.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday.

* He is going to give us one of his most powerful images, which reveals the type of relationship he wants us to have with him and with others. He also describes for us the means for us to have a truly successful life according to his terms.

* Jesus tells us, “I am the vine. You are the branches.” He and his faithful, he and the Church, exist together as vine and branches. This image of the fruitful union of God and his people was foretold throughout the Old Testament. The prophets often compared Israel to a vine. Isaiah declared, “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel” (Is 5:7). Hosea added, “Israel is a luxuriant vine that yields its fruit” (Hos 10:1). All of this was depicted visually in a stunning golden relief of a vine, with clusters of grapes as big as adults, running around the outside walls of the Temple of Jerusalem. The Church is the fulfillment of this image. The temple stands for God and when the people in faith attach themselves to God, they become a luxuriant vine stretching out its branches and bearing fruit even into the desert. Jesus was probably calling upon his apostles’ obvious knowledge of this golden sculpture as he was describing the image of the Vine and Branches on Holy Thursday evening, because they likely would have seen the gilded vine as they visited the temple earlier in the day. The problem, we know from our knowledge of Sacred Scripture, is that Israel as a whole didn’t stay attached to God in this way. God asked through Isaiah, “What more was there to do my for my vineyard that I had not done? Why, when I looked for the crop of grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes.” It didn’t bear good fruit, because it had detached itself from God through sin. Jesus mentioned this in one of his parables, when he said the Vineyard owner sent multiples waves of servants, and finally his Son, to collect his share of grapes at harvest time, but the tenants of the vineyard manhandled the servants and killed the Son. This was referring to salvation history and to the way Israel treated the prophets God sent to them and treated even Jesus himself. God looked to Israel to bear good fruit — which are deeds of love in union with God — but so often the harvest that was yielded was the wild fruit of a wild life, rejecting God’s prophets, God’s word, God’s love, God’s son.

* That’s why Jesus says at the beginning of this Sunday’s passage: “I am the true vine.” By doing so, he contrasted himself with the unfaithfulness of those who had failed to produce the harvest of love God wants in the world. He had come to replant the vine, to become the new temple, to make possible our bearing good fruit. And in the great mystery of salvation history, God makes the fruit he bears dependent on our being fruitful branches. A vine can’t bear fruit without branches. The stem bears only branches, but it’s the branches that bear fruit. For God to bear his fruit in the world, in other words, he has chosen to depend on us, that we remain attached to him and bear good fruit. Otherwise the great gift of his salvation, his love, won’t be seen in the world, people won’t be saved, the sap of his love will be wasted. Jesus wants to bear fruit in you and me.