Did you ever notice how much farming imagery there is in the Bible and especially in Jesus’s preaching? Agriculture was by far the occupation in ancient Israel; an estimated 90% of the people were involved in raising or processing crops and flocks. Farm work dictated the pace of life throughout the year with different tasks for different seasons. The main food crops were wheat, barley, legumes, figs, grapes and olives. Sheep, cotton plants, and flax provided fiber and cloth.
That dominance meant that Jesus and his hearers instinctively understood agricultural comparisons, for example, Jesus’s citation of Psalm 80, a plea to restore Israel, a vine transplanted by God from Egypt to Israel but now ravaged by the nations, or Israel as the well-loved vineyard of Isaiah’s friend that yielded only wild grapes (Isaiah 5:1-7). Jesus’s declaration to his disciples “I am the true vine” is the last of his “I am” sayings in John. “I am” refers back to the Lord’s majestic appearance to Moses in Exodus under the title “I am.” Jesus as True Vine implies a contrast “with Israel as the unfruitful or ravaged vine, while he is the nucleus of a renewed Israel that will yield the “fruits” that God, the proprietor of the vineyard, seeks.” (Brendan Byrne, Life Abounding, 235).
Jesus goes on to say “My Father is the vine grower,” whereas the disciples are “the branches.” These agricultural comparisons depict what we can call “divine discipline.” We live by abiding in Jesus as branches, whereas the Father cuts away the dead branches and prunes the others for further growth. The verbs in English, “cut away” and “prune,” conceal a word play in the original Greek. The almost similar verbs in Greek show the unity of the Father’s action to help the branches relate to the vine, “cut away,” hairein and “prune,” kathhairein. The agricultural images invite us to imagine our life in Christ as nourished and furthered by the Father as the source of Jesus’s mission.
What does Jesus mean by the phrase “bearing fruit”? Relying again on Brendan Byrne, the phrase probably refers to all the ways in which the love of Jesus, under the direction of the Father, is expressed by the members of the community toward each other. To continue the farming imagery, “bearing fruit” derives from the “sap” of the love coursing through the Vine in its branches.