Vine and Wine (Benedict xvi) beside The Father's Vineyard (von Balthasar)

Jesus of Nazareth Vol 1.

POPE BENEOICT XVI  ... Vine and Wine pp. 258-261

out being bound to its present servants, This threat-promise applies not only to the . . .. . 

The image of the vine is abandoned and replaced by the image of God's living building. The Cross is not an end, but a new beginning. The song of the vineyard does not end with the killing of the son. le opens the prospect that God will do something new. The affinity with John 2, which speaks of the destruction of the Temple and its reconstruction, is impossible to overlook. God does not fail; we may be unfaithful, but he is always faithful (cf. 2 Tim 2:13). He finds new and greater ways for his love. The indirect Christology of the early parables is transcended here into a fully open Christological statement.

["I am the true vine," the Lord says (Jn 15:1)].

The parable of the vine in Jesus' Farewell Discourses continues the whole history of biblical thought and language on the subject of the vine and discloses its ultimate depth. "I am the true vine," the Lord says (Jn 15:1). The word true is the first important thing to notice about this saying. Barren makes the excellent observation that "fragments of meaning, obscurely hinted at by other vines, are gamered up and made explicit by him. He is the true vine" (Gospel) p. 473). But the really important thing about this saying is the opening: "I am." The Son identifies himself with the vine; he himself has become the vine. He has let himself be planted in the earth. He has entered into the vine: The mystery of the Incarnation, which John spoke of in the prologue (0 his Gospel, is taken up again here in a surprising new way. The vine is no longer merely a creature that God looks upon with love, but that he can still uproot and reject. In me Son, he himself has become the vine; he has forever identified himself, his very being, with the vine.

This vine can never again be uprooted or handed over (0 be plundered. It belongs once and for all (0 God; through the Son God himself lives in it. The promise has become irrevocable, the unity indestructible. God has taken this great new step within history, and this constitutes the deepest content of the parable. Incarnation, death, and Resurrection come to be seen in their full breadth: "For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you ... was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him" (2 Cor I:l9f), as Saint Paul puts it. 

The idea that through Christ the vine has become the Son himself is a new one, and yet the ground for it has been prepared in biblical tradition. Psalm 80:18 closely associates the "Son of Man" with the vine. Conversely: Although the Son has now himself become the vine, this is precisely his method for remaining one with his own, with all the scattered children of God whom he has come to gather (cf Jn 11:52). The vine is a Christological title that as such embodies a whole ecclesiology. The vine signifies Jesus' inseparable oneness with his own, who through him and with him are all "vine;' and whose calling is to "remain" in the vine. John does not make use of the Pauline image of the "Body of Christ:' But the parable of the vine expresses substantially the same idea: the fact that Jesus is inseparable from his own, and that they are one with him and in him. In this sense, the discourse about the vine indicates the irrevocability of the gift God has given, never to take it back again. In becoming incarnate, God has bound himself At the same time, though, the discourse speaks of the demands that this gift places upon us in ever new ways.

The vine, we said, can no longer be uprooted or handed over to be plundered. It does, however, constantly need purification. Purification, fruit, remaining, commandment, love, unity-these are the key words for this drama of being in and with the Son in the vine that the Lord's words place before our soul. Purification-the Church and the individual need constant purification. Processes of purification, which are as necessary as they are painful, run through the whole of history, the whole life of those who have dedicated themselves to Christ. The mystery of death and resurrection is ever present in these purifications. When man and his institutions climb too high, they need to be cut back; what has become too big must be brought back to the simplicity and poverty of the Lord himself It is only by undergoing such processes of dying away that fruitfulness endures and renews itself

The goal of purification is fruit, the Lord tells us. What sort of fruit is it that he expects? Let us begin by looking at the fruit that he himself has borne by dying and rising. Isaiah and the whole prophetic tradition spoke of how God expected grapes, and thus choice wine, from his vine. This was an image of the righteousness, the rectitude that consists in living within the Word and will of God. The same tradition says that what God finds instead are useless, small, sour grapes that he can only throwaway. This was an image of life lived away from God's righteousness amid injustice, corruption, and violence. The vine is meant to bear choice grapes that through the process of picking, pressing, and fermentation will produce excellent wine.

Let us recall that the parable of the vine occurs in the context of Jesus' Last Supper. After the multiplication of the loaves he had spoken of the true bread from heaven that he would give, and thus he left us with a profound interpretation of the eucharistic bread that was to come. It is hard to believe that in his discourse on the vine he is not tacitly alluding to the new wine that had already been prefigured at Cana and which he now gives to us-the wine that would flow from his Passion, from his "love to the end" (Jn 13:1). In this sense, the parable of the vine has a thoroughly eucharistic background. It refers to the fruit that Jesus brings forth: his love, which pours itself out for us on the Cross and which is the choice new wine destined for God's marriage feast with man. Thus we come to understand the full depth and grandeur of the Eucharist, even though it is not explicitly mentioned here. ...