Fr Marco Lazzaron
n his teaching, Jesus often takes inspiration from things familiar to his listeners. Thus, while they heard, with their imagination they could also see. Today he speaks to us with the image of the branch and the vine.
The most important statement of today’s Gospel is that we are united to Jesus with a bond as deep and vital as the one that unites the branch to the vine. On a spiritual level, this lifeblood is the divine life given to us in Baptism, the Holy Spirit. This is an even closer union than the mother and the child in her womb. The same blood flows between mother and son; the mother’s breath and nourishment pass into the child. But the child, to live, must abandon his mother’s womb. In our case, it is quite the opposite: the branch lives and bears fruit only by remaining united to the vine.
Fr Peter has a lot of faith in my gardening skills and last week he asked me to prune the vine we have in the garden so that it can blossom in the next few months. Pruning a vine is a necessary act: if it is not pruned, the strength of the vine is lost, and it will produce more branches than necessary, with the consequence of not being able to bring them to maturity. If it remains for a long time without being pruned, the vine even becomes wild and produces only vine leaves and wild grapes. The same happens in our life: the person who wants to do too many things in life, or cultivates an infinite number of interests and hobbies, and will not be able to finish any of them: we need also to “prune our activities”.
Leonardo da Vinci defined sculpture as “the art of taking away”. All other arts consist of putting something: color on canvas, stone on stone in architecture, note on note in music. Only sculpture consists of removing the pieces of marble that are too many to bring out the figure you have in mind. Even Christian perfection is achieved in this way, by removing and dropping useless pieces: e.g., desires, ambitions, and projects that scatter us in all directions. One day Michelangelo, walking in a garden in Florence, saw, in a corner, a block of marble protruding from underground. He stopped suddenly and said: “An angel is enclosed in that block of marble”. And, arming himself with a chisel, he began to rough-hew that block until the figure of a beautiful angel emerged.
Even God looks at us and sees us like shapeless blocks of stone and says to himself: “There is a beautiful creature hidden inside there waiting to come to light”. So, he takes the chisel, which is the cross, he takes the pruner scissors and starts pruning. Suffering, fatigue, and tribulations serve our purification. Of course, it is not easy for anyone to bear the blows of the divine chisel. We all groan under the cross, it is natural. But all this is not without a purpose, after pruning there will be spring, and the fruits will come out.
Well, truly becoming branches, becoming the work of God, becoming true disciples, is a long and tiring journey, in which we are called to persevere, to remain united with the branch, who is Christ, a sap that brings us true and eternal life.