Easter Season

Gospel Reading: John 15: 1-27
(adapted from Madsen)

I AM the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that does not bear fruit HE takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit HE makes pure that it may bear more fruit. You have already been purified by the power of the word that I have spoken to you. 

Abide in me and I in 

 you.

As the branch cannot bear fruit out by itself unless it is given life by the vine, neither can you unless you stay united with me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever remains united with me and I in them, bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not remain united with me withers like a branch that is cut off. Such branches are gathered up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in me, and my words live on in you, pray for that which you also will, and it shall come about for you. By this, my Father is revealed, that you bear much fruit and become ever more my disciples.

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Live on in my love. If you take my aims into your will, then you will live on in my love, just as I have taken the aims of my Father into my will and live on in HIS love.

These words I have spoken to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 

This is the task I put before you: that you love one another as I have loved you.

No one can have greater love than this, than that they offer up their life for their friends. You are my friends if you follow the task I have given you. No longer can I call you servants, for servants do not know what their master is doing. But I call you my friends because I have made known to you all that I have heard from my Father. 

You did not choose me, but I have chosen you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should live on after you so that what you ask the Father in my name HE should give it to you. I say to you out of the fullness of my power: Love one another.

If people hate you, remember that they hated me before you. If you belonged to people in general, they would love you as belonging to them; but because you do not belong to them since I chose you out of humankind, people hate you.

Remember the word that I spoke to you: ‘A servant is not greater than their master.’ If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they have held on to my word, they will hold on to yours also. Everything that they do to you, they will do as though they did it to me, for they do not know HIM who sent me.

If I had not come and had not spoken to them, they would be without sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. He who hates me hates my Father also. If I had not done deeds among them, such as no one else has ever done, they would be without guilt. But now they have seen me and have still hated both me and my Father. 

But it was to fulfill what is written in their Law: ‘They hated me without a cause.’

But when the Comforter comes, the Spirit of Truth who proceeds from the Father, HE will bring knowledge of me and will be my witness. And you also will be my witnesses, because you have been united with me from the very beginning. 

Dear Friends, 

At the moment, New York City hosts the largest Raphael exhibition ever seen in this country at the Met Museum. It gives us the opportunity to see some of Raphael’s most famous Madonna paintings with the infant Jesus and some with both, Jesus and the slightly older child John, later known as John the Baptist. 

There was a period in art when sacred content was given a golden background. A deep blue also was deemed worthy of holiness, representing the divine. In many of Raphaela’s Madonna paintings the background is the landscape, the face of the earth. In many it is ever so delicate, almost fragile, so virginal in its appearance, so innocent and unsoiled. No longer is the background gold or uniformly blue. The sky, the clouds become a translucent blue background, seemingly not quite of this earth and yet part of the earth, for the Madonna with the infant on her arm or her lap or standing on this earth, leaning lovingly against her knees. 

Taken down from the cross on Good Friday, the body of Christ was laid into the earth. The earth became his grave. His body becomes the seed of a New Earth. But much has yet to happen between the conception and birth of this New Earth. It is for this that we need to preserve our aging earth as long as possible so that the embryo can be carried to full term in the aging body of the earth. 
Love and care for all of nature and our deepening compassion for the earth’s suffering, and the many signs of its inevitable aging as a living body, can school our inner eye. It allows us to see already now what the poet has gathered into a few words, simple and deep:
From herb, stone, sea and light’s pure glance he saw something already shining forth that bears a child like countenance. (Novalis)
It is the countenance of the New Earth, warmed and enlivened by the breath of the Risen One.