Today’s readings: Acts 9,26-31; 1 John 3,18-24; John 15,1-8

The imagery of the vine and the branches used in today’s gospel illustrates our being connected with the Lord as the source of true life, and emphasises the organic nature of the spiritual life. Organic here is in contrast to mechanical. I can belong to the community of faith ‘mechanically’, thinking that it suffices simply to be baptised or to keep random contact by attending on and off. Being connected with Him who is the source of our truest selves is, according to John’s gospel today, something much deeper, more meaningful and even more costly.

After Jesus presented himself as the good shepherd to highlight the need to have points of reference that guide us in life, today he speaks of himself as the vine, to highlight how vital the sources that make us who we are can be. In today’s gospel, John is affirming that as much as believing can be important, keeping the faith or remaining connected to the source that nourishes our faith may be even more important.

The imagery of the vine demonstrates further that it is not enough to be connected, because in the vine there are branches that bear fruit and branches that do not. We may mechanically still be there, without attaining any nourishment, and so without any possibility of really growing up in the understanding of faith, of ourselves and of who God really is for us.

Performance today has become a buzzword. How much one performs has become an important criterion at our places of work and even constitutive of our identity, on the professional side. If you perform, you are rewarded. The more you perform, the greater your possibilities to prosper. That may sound very functionalist in the way we deal with ourselves. But at the end of the day, that is also how our identities are moulded and measured.

Charles Taylor, a leading contemporary moral philosopher, in his book Sources of the Self, enquires into the sources of modern selfhood and demonstrates the richness we can still uncover in us in spite of the negative judgements we shower on the culture we live in. He was responding to the many critics who believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good.

The fact that the collectivity that once shaped our individual consciousness seems to be collapsing may, in the judgement of some, lead only to a merely dangerous and selfish subjectivism. But is this the truth about ourselves and about the times we live in?

There is also the other side of the coin. There is the modern turn inward that can help redefine our identity and make us focus more on how the quest to know ourselves can ultimately be the quest to know God. We forget how St Augustine altered the orientation within which our identity was formed. In our search, rather than taking as point of departure the vision of order in the world, St Augustine focussed on the light within us and the need to be attuned to it. This is not cheap subjectivism.

In the second reading, John warns about the need to be “children of the truth”. One of the most decisive rites of passage in our life of faith is to pass from words to facts, from mere talk to something real and active. Even from the first reading, we read how for St Paul it was not enough to preach in the name of Jesus. He still had struggle personally to gain credibility.

The truth of Easter, of Jesus’s being divine and our redeemer, are no longer self-evident truths to be taken for granted or to be simply transmitted as part of the culture we breathe. What we proclaim as our faith can easily remain mere talk if it is not corroborated by an interior truth in us that is practised rather than preached.

It is first and foremost to that truth within us that we need to reach out. That is the truth about ourselves that puts us in the right perspective and that provides us with the right criteria of discernment to know whether or not we are on the side of the truth.