Robert Barron - It's Time for Some Pruning
Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the fifth Sunday of Easter and, boy, the Gospel is so powerful from the Gospel of John because it speaks this truth, and I've talked about it a lot before, but it's what's distinctive really to Christianity. The Lord Jesus Christ is not a teacher from a distant age, not someone we remember fondly from long ago. Not a moral exemplar. I mean, who cares if that's all He is? Rather, John is particularly good at presenting this. Jesus is like a field of force. Jesus is a life force. We don't just listen to Him or imitate Him. We live in Him. Think of the very fact that He gives us His body to eat and His blood to drink, we remain in Him. Well, the Gospel today gives us one of the most beautiful and powerful images for this.
Listen, in John's Gospel, he says "I am" all the time because he's imitating the "ego eimi," the "I am who I am" from the Book of Exodus, so the divinity of Jesus being affirmed again and again. But here's a famous one. "I am the true vine and you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit. And anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither". How organic all that is. We're not talking about bland imitation, taking in a teaching the way I would from any inspiring figure. No, no. I'm talking about a life force that we're grafted onto Jesus and He's meant now, listen, to live His life in us. That's the intimacy that stands at the heart of Christianity.
That's why to this day, the church, too, is so organic in the way it understands, why the Eucharist is the source and sum of the Christian life, why it matters that we come to mass and we eat His body and drink His blood. All of that, all of that. So with that organic image very much in mind, listen to this as He elaborates upon it. "My father is the vine grower". So Jesus is the vine, we're grafted on as the branches. The vine grower is the father. Now, listen. "He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit". So you say, "How wonderful all this organic imagery, how beautiful".
Yeah, but there's kind of a dark side to it as well. Why? Because, well, the father is the vine grower, and what He's going to do is He's going to prune away all that is in us that is preventing the life of Christ from manifesting itself. So you're a branch grafted out of the vine, okay, and Christ is meant to live His life in you. But, but there are things in all of us sinners that are preventing that life to express itself. And any good gardener knows this. There's something kind of tough and brutal about gardening because there's a lot of cutting and slicing that goes on. If you want these plants to flourish, you can't just leave them alone.
"Hey, God is love and I'm doing okay. Just let me..." No, no, no. The father is very interested in you being fully alive so certain things have got to be cut away. So can I suggest to everybody this would be a really good for all of us sinners as a kind of spiritual exercise this week in light of this Gospel. What are those things in us that need pruning, that should be cut away, that if we're honest, we know are preventing the life of Christ fully to express itself in us? Can I mention just a couple? Here's the first one. Is there an old resentment that you're clinging to? There's someone who wounded you. There's a pain in your life and you are still angry at this person. You are still resentful. You still want revenge, and this resentment is kind of eating away at you.
It's like a suppurating wound. You know your life is going along okay, but you know, you know this thing is draining you of life and energy. I'd be willing to bet every person listening to me right now could name a resentment like that. Okay? How about during this Easter season, prune it away? Make that phone call. Write that note. Send an email. Reach out to this person. Offer forgiveness. It's hard. Yes, I know it's hard. That's why it's called pruning. And, of course, it's painful, but it will allow the life of Christ to surge more fully through you. So an old resentment, take a look at it. Here's a second one, and I confront this all the time in my internet work, especially among younger people.
Is there a soul-killing secularism that's taken root in you? You know what I mean. You lost contact with the transcendent. You lost contact with the sacred, with the holy, with God. Your whole life is just about this world, just about what you can accomplish here, just about the pleasures and honors and so on that can accrue to you in this world. And don't you know deep down that having taken this path, you find yourself in a state of very deep soul sadness? Because we're not meant to be satisfied simply by the goods of the world. And when we cut off contact with the transcendent, we stop praying. We stop going to mass, we stop attending the sacraments. What happens is it's like a cancer eating away at the soul.
Karl Barth, the great Protestant theologian from the last century, he said, "The besetting mortal sin of our time is not pride. Rather, it's sloth". It's spiritual laziness. It's a kind of spiritual boredom. And can I say I sense it all the time, especially among the young, who have disaffiliated from the church. When we lose contact with the transcendent, something is drying up in us. Okay? Okay? How about during this Easter season, that's something we can prune away. Now's the time to come back to mass. Now's the time to start praying again. Maybe there's an old rosary that your grandmother gave you that's gathering dust in a drawer. Take it out. Take it out. Attend to God. Attend to that still small voice of your own conscience. Prune away this soul-killing secularism.
Here's a third one, and can I be kind of blunt about this? Pornography is a curse in our society, so I can almost sense it even through the camera. Whenever I'm preaching or speaking and I mention the word pornography, there's suddenly this very intense silence in the room. It's because it's so widely used and so widely available. It's a multi-billion dollar industry in our country alone. The internet, of course, has increased its range, its availability and, hence, its awful addictive power. You know, years ago, it would be relatively difficult to come by pornography.
Now young kids can get it cost-free on their smartphones. As I say, it's designed to be addicting. And so young people, often from a very early age, find themselves addicted to it. And anyone that's caught in the grip of that addiction, what do you know? That it's just soul-killing, dehumanizes those who produce it, it denigrates those who use it. It's often tied up with human trafficking. It's often tied up with abuse of young people. Don't even try to tell me it's a victimless crime. It's not. Has pornography taken a grip on your soul? It has for a lot of people in our society. All right? If it has, here's the time for some pruning.
Here's the time for some pruning to cut that out of your life. You know, here's the last observation about it. Some exorcists that I know and whom I trust have said that it's one of the dark power's favorite ways to get into someone's soul. The devil has to wait for a door to open, right? He doesn't come barging in. He waits for us to open a door. And one of those doors, these exorcists tell me, is pornography, which is why the dark power is so much at work. Can I mention just a couple more? Has avarice and materialism taken hold of your soul? And a very old problem and the Bible's very clear about it. That's why the love of money, we're told, is the root of all evil. Avarice. It's being so caught up in nice things, the good things of the world, that it becomes a preoccupation.
What happens when you allow avarice to take hold is it cuts you off from all these other moral and spiritual values. That's the King Midas story, that everything he touches turns to gold. How wonderful. Well, no. It ends up killing the very things that you love the most. Has avarice taken control of you, a sort of gross materialism? If it has, it's time for some pruning. You need to cut that out of your life because it's going to kill the soul at the end of the day.
Here's the last one and, again, very much with Pope Francis in mind because he's very strong on this. To what extent has gossiping become a soul-killing activity? And I think we're all guilty, you know? Gossiping, talking about people in a mean-spirited way, it's like our favorite indoor pastime. It's what most of us human beings do much of the time when we get together. You know, we'll talk about maybe bland and neutral things for a while, but watch it. Watch your own conversations. Pretty soon, nine times out of 10, we will start turning toward gossiping about other people. Stealing their reputation. I'd put it there under the rubric of the Seventh Commandment, Thou shalt not steal. We can steal physical things from people. But far more terrible really is stealing someone's reputation.
That's what you're doing when you gossip. Behind their back surreptitiously you're robbing them of their good name. I think it's time, in light of this Gospel, to do a searching moral inventory about gossiping. How much time do you spend? And maybe even keeping an eye on your own soul, watch yourself for about a week. Keep track of all the times you were drawn into it or tempted to gossip. Keep track of it. St.Ignatius of Loyola recommends we do that. As we examine our conscience, we find those things that are particularly bad and let's keep a careful tabulation of them. Good. I'd recommend that. See how often you're tempted to gossip.
Now, let me close with this. I've been talking about doing the pruning. Fair enough. But what Jesus says not so much we do the pruning. Your Heavenly father does the pruning. So the move that we should make is very important, is maybe it's one of the things I mentioned, maybe it's something else, but name those things in you that are stopping the flow of Christ's life in you. And then in prayer, turn them over to the great keeper of the vine. Turn them over to God, the Father, in prayer. Lord, prune these things out of my life.
Trust me. See, He will. We can ask for all kinds of extraneous things, and God may or may not give them to us, but He will always give us the gift of the Holy Spirit. And that's really what you're asking for when you say, "Lord, here's this thing in my life that I know is stopping Christ from living in me. Prune it away. Prune it away". Make that prayer. Identify the pain. Identify what this thing is, and then actively turn that over to God, the Father. And God bless you.