The Branches Live by Remaining in the Vine

Israel had long been God’s vine: brought out of Egypt in Psalm 80:8, planted and disappointing in Isaiah 5, a “noble vine” turned “degenerate” in Jeremiah 2:21. “True” marks the genuine article against that history. A great golden vine hung over the entrance to Herod’s temple, according to Josephus. A “husbandman” in 1611 was a farmer, one who tills.

The two verbs rhyme in Greek: airei, he takes away, and kathairei, he cleans. Some interpreters read the first as “lifts up”, a vinedresser raising a trailing branch off the ground, though most take it as cutting off. The second verb chimes with “clean” in the very next line.

At the foot washing Jesus had said “ye are clean, but not all” (13:10). Judas has since gone out, and the exception is dropped. What made them clean is named as “the word”, not the water of the basin.

Abide, meno, occurs about ten times in the first ten verses, the drumbeat of the chapter. “And I in you” can be read as the second half of the command or as a promise attached to it: abide in me, and I will abide in you. The Greek leaves the verb unstated.

The image is now spelled out on both sides, vine and branches, and “true” drops away. “Without me” is literally “apart from me”, and the Greek ends with a double negative, not able to do not anything, which in Greek strengthens rather than cancels.

Ezekiel 15 asks what vine wood is good for and answers that it cannot even make a peg to hang a pot on; its only use is fuel. The grammar slides from one branch to many: “he is cast forth”, then “men gather them”, where the Greek simply says “they gather”.

The condition moves from “abide in me” to “my words abide in you”, so the person and his sayings stand interchangeably. Manuscripts differ between the future “ye shall ask” and a plain imperative, “ask”; either way the asking comes from someone already shaped by those words.

“So shall ye be my disciples” uses the verb for becoming. These men have followed Jesus for years, yet discipleship is still something they will grow into as fruit appears, not a status they finished acquiring on the day of their call.

“Continue” translates meno, the same verb rendered “abide” a few lines earlier. The King James translators said in their preface that they had not tied themselves to “an uniformity of phrasing”, and this is one place where the English hides a single repeated Greek word.

Jesus submits to the condition he sets. “I have kept” is a Greek perfect, spoken the night before his death as if the life of obedience were already complete. In 8:29 he had said “I do always those things that please him.”

Jesus’ own joy is named here for the first time in the Book of John. “Full” is the verb John the Baptist used of himself as friend of the bridegroom: “this my joy therefore is fulfilled” (3:29). The joy the Baptist found in Jesus is now offered from Jesus himself.

The “new commandment” of 13:34 is repeated almost word for word, now called “my commandment”. The “as I have loved you” points back only a few hours, to a basin, a towel and a master on his knees before their feet (13:14-15).

“Lay down his life” is the good shepherd’s phrase from 10:11-18. The same verb, tithemi, described Jesus laying aside his garments before washing their feet (13:4), and taking them again after (13:12). The small act at the table anticipated the large one.

Abraham is the Old Testament’s “friend” of God (Isaiah 41:8; 2 Chronicles 20:7), and God spoke with Moses face to face “as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exodus 33:11). The title the disciples receive had belonged to the patriarch and the lawgiver.

“Servants” is douloi, slaves. The Roman court had its own title, amicus Caesaris, friend of Caesar, a rank of trusted insiders; the crowd will throw exactly that title at Pilate in 19:12. Here the difference between slave and friend is what they are told, not what they are spared.

Students in Jesus’ day normally chose a rabbi and attached themselves to him; here the order is reversed. “Ordained” in 1611 meant appointed or set in place, and the Greek is again tithemi, the verb of laying down one’s life in verse 13.

Verse 12 opened this paragraph with the command to love one another, and verse 17 closes it with the same words, a bracket around everything said about friendship, choosing and fruit. The plural “these things” gathers the whole of it into that one instruction.

“Ye know” can equally be an imperative, “know ye”. “Before it hated you” is literally “first of you”. Jesus once told his own brothers “the world cannot hate you; but me it hateth” (7:7); the disciples now move from the brothers’ position to his.

“World” appears five times in a single verse. “Love his own” turns the prologue around: there the Word “came unto his own, and his own received him not” (1:11). The world knows how to love its own; it simply does not count the disciples among them.

“Remember” is the first of several appeals to memory in this part of the discourse (compare 16:4). Some read the last clause as bitter irony, since those who harassed Jesus did not keep his saying; others take it straight, that some will receive the disciples’ word as they received his.

Ignorance of the sender is the diagnosis, and the Book of John will repeat it almost exactly in 16:3: “because they have not known the Father, nor me.” The hostile will not know whom they are really opposing, which is why “for my name’s sake” carries the weight.

“Cloke” is the 1611 spelling of cloak, and the Greek prophasis means a pretext or excuse, the word behind “for a pretence” in Mark 12:40 and “a cloke of covetousness” in 1 Thessalonians 2:5. A robe that hides what is underneath has been taken away.

Seven words in English, the shortest verse in this part of the chapter. It restates in negative form what Jesus said in 5:23: “He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him.” There is no neutral place to stand between the two.

“Works which none other man did” echoes the healed blind man, who argued in 9:32 that since the world began nobody had opened the eyes of one born blind. The doubled “both... both” in the last clause is in the Greek, holding seeing and hating, and Son and Father, together.

The quotation comes from the Psalms, where the phrase appears in both 35:19 and 69:4, yet Jesus calls it “their law”, just as in 10:34 he called a psalm “your law”. Law could mean the whole of Scripture, and “their” lets the opponents’ own book condemn them.

“Proceedeth from the Father” became the hinge of a long division between East and West. Western churches added “and the Son”, filioque, to the Nicene Creed from the Council of Toledo in 589 onward; Eastern churches objected that the words go beyond this verse. The verse itself also has Jesus doing the sending.

“Ye shall bear witness” is a present tense in Greek, which could be either “ye bear witness” or a command, “bear witness”. The qualification, “with me from the beginning”, is exactly the test applied when Judas is replaced in Acts 1:21-22: one who accompanied them from the baptism of John.