Fifth Sunday of Easter
When I was young I had a bad encounter with chocolate (I ate too much), and so I tend not to eat very much chocolate candy. I’ll do the occasional Snickers bar, but when it comes to Hershey’s chocolate bars or kisses, or other types of pure chocolate candies, I tend not to eat them. What I do love is fruit. Especially berries, but also grapes, apples, oranges, pears, kiwi, pineapple, mangoes, etc., I tend to satisfy my sweet tooth with fruit.
How do we stay connected? We read the Word of God, the Bible; we pray daily; we go to confession regularly and worship God at Mass at least each Sunday and Holyday; we serve Jesus in our service of the poor. Think about how much time we devote to all sorts of other things, but how much time do we devote to Jesus?
But, rather than talking about remaining connected to Jesus, today I want to focus on the result of staying close to Jesus. What happens when the branches stay connected to the vine? You get grapes! Sweet, delicious grapes! The grapes are the fruit that are produced by staying connected. So Jesus promises us that if we remain in him, then we will bear much fruit. If we don’t bear fruit, then we will be thrown into the fire, like a brach that no longer produces grapes.
How do we bear fruit? So the word “Catholic” is thrown around as is being baptized means that a person doesn’t need to do anything else Sometimes in my mind I start wondering if I ever saw the person at Mass, if the person read the Bible regularly and prayed daily. I wonder how much the person cared for the poor and the marginalized. It is easy, as St. John reminded us in the second reading, to love “in word or speech,” but bearing fruit means loving “in deed and truth.”
It some ways it used to be easier to be Catholic. We had external markers that at least gave an appearance of our faith. When Betty Baptist invited Charlie Catholic over for dinner on Friday night, Charlie made sure to say that he couldn’t have meat. Many families spent part of Saturday morning not on the soccer field, but in the confessional. And, to the extent possible, many Catholics avoided any sort of menial work on Sundays.
Those externals don’t necessarily mean that you’re bearing fruit. You can abstain from meat and not love Jesus; you can go to confession but not be truly sorry; you can avoid work on Sundays but not do it to grow closer to God. But bearing fruit does mean that our life is different.
I know we don’t like to be different. But being Catholic means being different, just as Jesus was different. It means being patient with the person who cut in right before the construction zone starts. It means not participating in the office gossip about the employee who doesn’t seem to get along or get the job done. It means treating all people, regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual-orientation with respect and dignity because all of us are created in the image and likeness of God.
But being different also means that we avoid taking God’s Name in vain. It means being here, at Mass, every Sunday, whether we feel like it or not, or whether we think we’re getting anything out of it or not, because our time during Mass is about worshipping God well more than it is about us “getting” something. Being different means that we help women to choose life rather than abortion; that we conceive a child according to God’s plan rather than through artificial means like in vitro fertilization or surrogacy. It means we give time, talent, and treasure to taking care of those who cannot care for themselves. Those are all ways that we bear fruit, though there are, of course, more.
Do we do it perfectly? I know I don’t! I try to be, but realize that I am not always a paragon of discipleship. But when I fail, I turn back to the Lord, asking for His mercy in the Sacrament of Penance, and with true sorrow and a desire to sin no more with God’s help, I start again, to stay connected to Jesus and bear fruit.
It’s easy to say, “I’m Catholic.” You can say that without doing much of anything else. But in order to bear fruit, as Jesus asks us to, we have to respond to the graces God gives us by remaining with Him on the vine. And Catholics bearing fruit is exactly how this, and any parish, can grow, so that we, like the "church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria” that we heard about in our first reading, can be “built up and [walk] in the fear of the Lord, and…[grow] in numbers.”
