Jesus emphasizes this dependency relationship when he says: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who lives in me, and I in him, will produce abundantly, for apart from me you can do nothing”. Jesus wants us to live in Him, and He wants to live in us. This mutual indwelling is the Divine Union that God intended from the beginning, but which was disrupted by intentional human willfulness, as described in the allegorical parable of the fall of Adam and Eve. Jesus has now come to heal this rupture, and bring our fallen human nature back into right relationship with God. In the paradigm we have been using, Jesus has come to deliver us out of the weed and into the flower. And this right relationship is one of love freely given. Just as the rupture was caused by using our free will to disobey God, and attempt to compete with God, Jesus now invites us to use our free will to obey His commandment to love, which unites us with Jesus’ love and Jesus’ life and heals the ruptured relationship with God. If we do freely choose to love, Jesus promises we will “produce abundantly”, but if we freely choose not to love, we “ can do nothing” but wither away.

It is really quite amazing that Jesus, Who is God in human form, deeply desires to share His whole life with us, especially His essential essence, His divine love. It is perhaps even more amazing that Jesus deeply desires that we fully share our lives with Him, just as he shares His life completely with God the Father. And the “glue that binds Jesus to His Father, and Jesus to us, and each of us to each other is divine love. We can think of God’s divine love (the love that the Three Persons of the Trinity have for one another, and for us humans) as the sap that courses through the vine and out into all the branches, thereby giving life to the branches and producing fruitful grapes from each branch.

This is certainly a beautiful image of divine union, the goal of all Christians. In divine union, we humans finally live out of our “True Self”, as a branch totally attached to Jesus, the True Vine. When we are living out of our “True Self”, the love of God flows through us, unobstructed by emotional suffering, out to God and to one another. We are bound to God and to one another by the love of Christ; the very same love which binds the Trinity together as one God, flows out to us humans and binds us to God, and flows through us back to God and out to one another, binding us all (the Trinity and all humans) together in love by God’s divine love.

This communion of love is a beautiful truth, but the reader can certainly be forgiven for wondering how the reader can actually participate in this love in everyday life. To show us how to do this, we will start with what Jesus has to say in verses 9-17 above. And then to actually accomplish the loving that Jesus commands, we will need the help of the saints, who learned from Jesus that self surrender is necessary in order to be able to love.

In verses 9-17 above, Jesus makes it clear that He wants us to remain in His love, that is, remain firmly attached to the vine. Jesus further says that we will remain in His love if we keep his commandment: “This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you” If we are able to obey this commandment, Jesus promises “that my joy may be yours and your joy may be complete” So Jesus wants to give us His joy so that our joy may be complete. This “complete joy” is one of the deepest desires of the human heart. The human being, made in the image and likeness of God, is created to image the love of God to others, and in the very process of loving, experience the Joy of Christ, in the likeness of Jesus experiencing His own joy.

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