St. John gives us many powerful words and images in his gospel to help us see who Our Lord is, his identity, and to help us understand the nature of the relationship he has with us. Today he gives us the image of the vine.  Christ is the vine, we are the branches.  This is how he is close to us: this is the kind of mechanism he uses to remain permanently tied to those of us he has chosen for his own.  The vine is a title for Christ that shows his connection with his people, with us: it shows how inseparable he wants to be from us.  It shows that this gift that God gives us: this gift of a true relationship with him, cannot be revoked or destroyed.  In coming to this earth, in taking on human flesh, God has tied himself to us forever.  He is the vine; we are the branches.  The vine gives life to the branches and protects them.  The branches can no longer be broken off or uprooted, because nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.  We even become part of the vine itself.  We are safe and affixed to Christ, and God’s life flows through us. 

But even grafted to Christ, we are still in constant need of purification: both human society itself and each of us individually are always in need of a little pruning.  Purification is always a painful thing: whenever we face our sins and weaknesses, whenever we resolve to change, we place ourselves in a really vulnerable and uncomfortable position.  It’s easier to convince ourselves that all our problems are someone else’s fault.  But the Lord tells us today, that if we truly wish to bear fruit, then purification is necessary.  Every branch that bears fruit, he prunes, so that it will bear more fruit.  This is the mystery of death and resurrection.  When we are willing to die a little bit: to let the Lord look at us closely with his piercing glance and burn away our impurities, then we can grow and bear fruit, both for our own lives and for the world around us.  We shouldn’t be afraid to be pruned a little bit, so that we can grow more fully.  We should take advantage of all the ways that God gives us to look at ourselves honestly.  First of all, there’s nothing more powerful for this than the sacrament of confession.  Confession is the sacrament of honesty and the sacrament of realism.  For just a minute, we drop the shield that we use to protect ourselves from the judgment of the world, the shield of pretending that everything we do and everything we are is already perfect.  That’s what we want people to think: the “I meant to do that” defense.  God gives us two pictures of ourselves in the sacrament of confession, side by side: we see who we are, and we see who should be.  And we ask God to prune away the differences.  And God can do it: that’s why the sacrament is so important, because we could never ever muster the courage and conviction to do this on our own consistently without his help. 

Regular confession though, helps us foster the mental habit of opening ourselves up to God in this way, so that it becomes part of our daily life, even outside the sacrament.  And this is what our goal should be: to have a habit of honest self-reflection.  Of keeping an eye on ourselves, so to speak, so that we can continuously offer to the Lord whatever needs to pruned away in our life.  That way our lives can be a constant stream of spiritual fruitfulness: we can start to experience these important things more and more, things like holiness of life, true peace that can’t be disturbed by occasional misfortune, true freedom.  The first and necessary step is not to run away from the cross.  When the Lord challenges us and asks us to die to ourselves, let’s trust that he will lead us through that process of purification to a greater fruitfulness, and to a deep and abiding Resurrection joy.