Every day I give thanks to God for the blessing of serving as priest in our community. Every day, I am given many chances to be grateful again when I witness the wonderful works that are being done by so many, inside, and outside of the Parish.
This weekend, your leadership team will be clearly visible and available. They are an amazing team. Working with them over the last six months has been very satisfying. I have been moved to tears at times by the depth of their understanding and their love for the Lord and for His church. I have been humbled by the amount of time they have given to bring a whole range of life-giving opportunities to birth in the parish. This team is growing all the time as we ask the Lord to enrich our understanding of the real situation we are living in and respond to it with love.
The vision I am asking everyone to ponder and to embrace, ‘To be with Christ and to be sent by Him to relieve the suffering of the world’, is not hard to grasp or understand. That each one of us chooses, really chooses, every day, to draw closer to Jesus and to ask Him to send us to relieve the suffering of our sisters and brothers. Here too we must include all sentient beings and Mother Earth herself who call to us for help. This vision has not been plucked out of thin air. It comes straight from the mouth of God. Jesus makes the first move. His horizon touches ours. We are elevated and begin to see everything with new eyes. This transformation doesn’t happen automatically. It needs us to welcome the gift and to try to grow in our understanding of who Jesus is and what He is teaching. If you like, we must choose to abide in Him as he chooses to abide in us. Jesus points to a wonderful possibility but it will only become real if we work with Him to make it real.
There is an old saying that goes, “Make all your cares into a single care and God will see to all your cares”. In the fifth Sunday in Eastertide, Saint John’s Gospel lays before us the image of the vine, the vineyard, and the vinedresser! Just as the vine connects the plant to the nourishing earth, Jesus is the connection between God and Creation. He asks us to be more aware of this connection in our daily lives. He is the true vine because He never forgets or loses this flow of life from the Father. His horizon now and is Eternal, His gaze on us and on the face of God. Just as the vine grows, so He calls us to grow. Being a disciple is not static and it is not a status. It is a process, a journey. We have to want this horizon and we have to work hard with what we have been given.
The vinedresser knows the laws of spiritual and biological growth. He cuts away the dead and dying branches because He can see there is no effort to grow. But where people are trying to grow, His pruning shears are life giving. The possibility of more and better fruit is what guides the hand of the vinedresser. Anything that blocks the flow of life between us and Jesus will be cut away.He sets us free from competing agendas so that we can focus on the one thing necessary. The contrasting images of “branches bearing much fruit” and “withered and burned branches” set out the options. The word of Jesus will, if we let it, create in us a single wish. The wish to be close to His Abba. The wish to mediate the flow of Love, which flows into us, out and into the world. He calls us to look up. To see more than we had ever seen. The new horizon grows and becomes even more attractive. Can fruit be far behind?
