Apr 27, 2024

Spiritual Pruning (5th Sunday Easter B)


The previous Sunday’s Good Shepherd theme has allowed us to see Christ as our caring leader and companion who is ever ready to sacrifice all for our sake. But today’s image of the vine and branches brings us to an awareness of an even more profound level of relationship between us and the Lord. Christ is not just a leader or a companion, He is our very life.  He is the vine and we, his disciples, are the branches.  This reveals the intimate union we have with Christ and, through him, with the Father.  We share the one and the same Spirit-life with the Risen Lord.  We are so united with him that we cannot live, we cannot do anything fruitful apart from him much as a branch withers and unable to bear fruits when cut off from the vine.

Hence, today’s gospel (Jn 15: 1-8) invites us to remain with the Lord: “Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me” (v. 4).

Remaining in the Lord means cultivating our intimate relationship with him and nurturing the very life we have with him.  One aspect of the imagery of the vine that suggests the necessity of nurturing this intimacy is the art of pruning. The vine grower, that is, the Father, takes away every branch that does not bear fruit, and “everyone that does, he prunes so that it bears more fruit” (v. 2).

Let us then look into this aspect of pruning as an art of spiritual nurturance.  May I suggest, as an insight, three ways of appraising our experiences of being pruned.  We may understand this spiritual pruning as a process of purification, a process of discernment, and a process toward surrendering.

Pruning as a process of purification. We are always in need of purification. The more intimate we become with the Lord, the more we need to be purified from the habits of sin. Sin and divine life cannot co-exist.  When we allow our habits of sin to persist in us, these habits undermine our intimacy with the Lord. Our capacity to bear much fruit is diminished. Hence, we need to submit ourselves to pruning.  We need to be constantly purified from our sins so that we are always disposed to the life-giving grace of God.  When we are freed from sin, God remains in us and we remain in Him. This strengthens our intimacy with the Lord.

“You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you” (v. 3).  This reminds us that Jesus’ word purifies us.  As an art of pruning, then, we are invited to immerse ourselves always in the word of Jesus by reading the scriptures, reflecting on it, praying with it, and acting upon it. His word reflected and prayed upon purifies our day-to-day intentions and conforms our being and doing with that of God.

What are the habits of sin that hamper my intimacy with the Lord? Can I allow the word of God to purify me every day and hence nurture my intimacy with Him?

Pruning as process of discernment.  Oftentimes we are not bearing much fruit because we are not primarily concerned with what is essential.  We are distracted by too much worldly cares. We are bombarded with many choices each day from the most trivial things to the profoundest options. Most of the time we don’t discern; we just embrace uncritically just anything that is attractively presented to us and hence spend our time, talent, treasure, energy, and life pursuing concerns of this world aimlessly.  The result of this disoriented pursuit is emptiness.  No fruits. 

We need to trim down our concerns and discern what is essential from the passing fancies of this secular society.  Pruning may be seen as discerning our purpose as Christ’s disciples.  Amid this growing secularized or “Godless” society, Christ’s disciples are called to remain in him. In the language of the second reading (1 Jn 3: 18-24), to remain in the Lord is to believe in him and to keep his commandment: “We should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another just as he commanded us” (v. 23). For us disciples of the Lord, what is essential is that which brings growth in faith and in our love for one another.  And this is particularly what’s dying in our communities with the onslaught of secularism. Hence, we need to be pruned by our discernment of our essential purpose.  Is the Lord with me in what I do now in life? Or Am I in the Lord as I do what I do in life?

Pruning as a process toward surrendering to God.  When we live in our habits of sin compounded by the Godless culture around us, it is not surprising that this Godlessness may characterize our lifestyle. Meaning, sin and worldly cares become our way of being. They become so much a part of us that we begin to resist any invitation to change. Or sometimes we are still aware of God’s presence in our life but we have grown satisfied and complacent in our comfort zones.  We definitely need pruning to shake off these attachments.  Sometimes, what awakens us is a tremendous experience of pain, like the experience of failure, of great loss, of serious health problem, etc. 

God allows these painful experiences to happen not as punishment but as a powerful intervention to bring us back to him. When we are confronted with the fact of losing everything we believed to be important to us, we either wallow in despair and anger or, with the last ounce of faith, we cling to God and humbly submit.  I believe our experiences of loss are graced moments meant to enable us see clearly that apart from God we are nothing. Our experiences of loss are invitation to move on with hope for a new beginning of a much fruitful life with God. We need to surrender and remain in God.

May our experiences of being pruned nurture our intimacy with God and our fruits give glory to his name: “By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples” (v. 8).

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