2. What suggested this lovely parable of the vine and the branches is equally unimportant and undiscoverable. The great truth in this chapter, applied in manifold directions, and viewed in many aspects, is that of the living union between Christ and those who believe in Him, and the parable of the vine and the branches affords the foundation for all that follows.
The subject may be considered under three heads : — I. The Vine.
II. The Vine and its Branches. III. The Husbandman.
The Vine.
** I am the true vine."
Two currents of thought are united by Christ when He speaks of Himself as " the true, the ideal vine."
1. The Hebrew nation and Church in Old Testament times is
called a vine. The Psalmist says : " Thou hast brought a vine out
of Egypt : thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it." Isaiah
183
i84 THE TRUE VINE
says : " The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel." Jeremiah says : " I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed : how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?" Ezekiel says of the kings of David's house : " Thy mother was like a vine, in thy blood, planted by the waters ; she was fruitful and full of branches by reason of many waters. . . . And now she is planted in the wilderness, in a dry and thirsty land." The vine was used as an emblem of the Jewish nation under the Maccabees in the second century before Christ, and appears on their coins. But the people of Israel failed to live a Ufe in harmony with the emblem. They did not bring forth fruit to God. They were not the True Vine.
Now, the Lord Jesus Christ has been planted in the earth like a great fruit-bearing tree, to do what the Hebrew nation failed to do. He is the " true," that is, the genuine, the real^ the perfect Vine ; not a mere shadow of it, b\it its very root and stem, at once living and life-giving. He has been planted in the world of man- kind and in the soil of human nature, that our race may yield fruit to the glory of God.
"^ ^ The departure of Israel from God and their ingratitude is illustrated by the comparison with " wild grapes," " the degenerate plant of a strange vine," "an empty vine," "grapes of gall." Finally, our Lord has selected the vine as the type of Himself in His intimate union with His disciples, who bore fruit through their union with Him : " I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman." " I am the vine, ye are the branches." ^
2. But Christ may also have called Himself the true vine in distinction from the material vine, the image of which He had conjured up in the mind of His disciples. The images of the Bible, especially those employed by Christ, are not merely poetic figures. The outward is a real symbol of the invisible world; physical growths are a parable of spiritual growths, the kingdom of nature is a picture of the kingdom of grace, because both come from the same creative hand, are made subject to the same great laws, and are under the same great King. The physical vine is the shadow; Christ is the true, real vine, whom the shadow symbolizes; and it will last when the shadow has passed away.
» 11. B. Tristram, The Natural Ilistonj of the Bihlc, 413.
/'
ST. JOHN XV. I, 2 185
*[[ The material creations of God are only inferior examples of that finer spiritual life and organism in which the creature is raised up to partake of the Divine nature.^
II.
The Vine and the Branches.
One of the most important aspects of Christ, the Vine, is His relationship to His people, the branches of the Vine, and this aspect is set forth in the fifth verse of the same chapter : " I am the vine, ye are the branches." \
1. There is a personal relation. As in other connexions of thought (" I am the light of the world," " I am the bread of life," and the like), Jesus here fixes the eye of faith on His own person ; but in the present saying He regards Himself as inclusive of His members, who participate in His own life, and, as it were, com- plete it. He says, not " I am the root, I am the stem," but " I am the vine — and ye are the branches," presenting Himself and the Church as one organic whole. Thus we see in Jesus the Incarnate Son, a new stock of humanity, planted of God in the earth, able to expand His own life over others, and so to include their lives in His own, and (if we may use the language here suggested) to ramify Himself in them. This capacity is the consequence of the conjunction in His own person of the human and the Divine natures ; for by the one He enters into union with us in the flesh, and by the other He communicates Himself to us as " a quickening Spirit." ^