Luther on Gardening

John 15:1
Then Jesus said I am the true Vine and my father tends my vineyard

Luther wrote, "this passage presents a very comforting picture. Christ understood all the suffering that he and his followers would experience were the results of a diligent gardener. Grapevines can only grow and produce when they are carefully tended by a gardener. Christ wants to look at trials and sufferings differently than the way they might appear to the rest of the world. Suffering never occurs apart from God's will, so it's not a sign of his anger, but his mercy and fatherly love. It always serves for the best!

It's an art to believe that what hurts and distresses us, doesn't happen in order to harm us but rather to make us better. Now, if the vine were aware of this, and if the vines could talk, they might see the gardener cutting around its roots with a hoe, the gardener pruning its branches with a pruning knife, watching those branches fall off and feeling the pain of the cutting, and ask 'what on earth does this gardener think he is doing? I will wither and spoil because he's whittled me down to nothing, taken away my soil, scraped me with iron teeth! Why is he tearing and pinching me everywhere, leaving me to stand here half naked? You are more cruel to me than you are to the other plants and trees!' And the gardener would reply, 'you obviously don't understand. Those branches I cut away because they are no longer useful. They sap your strength and will eventually kill you! The other branches, the healthier ones, can't produce fruit and will also begin to fail. So it is for your own good that I'm doing this now. I do it to help you yield more fruit, and produce better wine!"

While it is fun to imagine this conversation between the vine and the gardener, it does rather speak for our own concerns. Why does God prune us? Or more to the point, why does he allow the proning to take place at all? Because, as Jesus points out and as Luther explains, we are headed for death, vines and people alike die. The question is not can we avoid death, but will we avoid life? Will we be productive vines when we live, bearing good fruit, producing good wine? Luther and Jesus say "yes" but don't expect a painless process! Pain is never welcome, nor is pruning to be desired - it is a violent process. But God, the gardener, is good and the pain is meant to serve the good! So we should not be afraid, for as the old saying goes, no pain, no gain!

Prayer: Lord, help us to not whine about our pain. Pointless pain would be bad, but pain that enriches, pain that enables growth and productivity, pain that produces good fruit and sweet wine, while unwelcome, fulfills us and our purpose. So prune us if you must, love us when you will, and redeem us because you can! Amen.