Bearing Fruit

In John 15:1-17, Jesus talks about “bearing fruit” and “friendship.” This is a reflection on the meaning of “bearing fruit” in Scripture, the ways in which John innovates a relationship between fruit, friendship, and death in this passage, and an argument about the counter-intuitive places I think we should look for friendship in Scripture.

Bearing Fruit in Scripture

The Man and Woman in the garden are given the vocation to “be fruitful and multiply” at the very beginning, and they mark Israel’s progress throughout the first five books. The opening words of Exodus uses the same words to signal this progress:

These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. All the descendants of Jacob were seventy persons; Joseph was already in Egypt. Then Joseph, died and all his brothers and all that generation. But the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.

Joseph’s ascension to dominion in Egypt resolves the drama of Genesis. The Hope of the World is that “the Seed of the Woman” will crush the head of the serpent and, by the end of Genesis, “the Seed” is looking pretty good. But the flourishing of the Seed, both in Genesis and throughout the first five books, depends on the bringing forth of children and the bringing forth of food.

The ministry of the Man in the Garden and the identity of the Woman are both agonized in the calculated curses of Genesis 3. The Woman will multiply (taravah), but God will multiply (taravah) her pain (betsev) in childbearing. She will bring forth (tehlediy) children toilsomely (bitssavon). The ground (adamah) will bring forth (tehledah) thorns and thistles along with its fruit, and the Man (adam) will eat eat of them toilsomely (bitssavon). The word for “toil,” which is bitssavon, is used only three times in Scripture—twice here, and once in the mouth of Lamech to introduce Noah, “Out of the ground that the LORD has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful itssavon of our hands.”

Those who do not trust God’s provision are of a different kind, and they are used as foils of what it means to be faithful in Genesis. Sarah and Rachel describe their plans to get children by their husbands using the verb banah, which means to build, rather than the more common verb used to describe bearing children, yalad. You get the idea that what Sarah and Rachel are up to is not quite right for a couple of reasons. For one, banah is the verb used to describe the building of the Tower of Babel, which was bad; and for another, they sought children in competition against other women, not out of faith in the promise.

The rest of the Old Testament considers Israel as, among other things, the vine which God brought out of Egypt, and fixed onto the trellis of Levitical worship until it matured. Considered one way, Jesus (like John the Baptist immediately before him) is a prophet just like Israel’s other prophets, calling Israel to true worship of the LORD, to patient endurance of the toil which the curses had added to their original agrarian and domestic vocation. The toil had gotten too hard, and people lacked the faith it took to keep up the good work. Considered another, he is unlike the other prophets. They only labored to tend the LORD’s vine/vineyard; Jesus is the True Vine.

If the biggest development in Scripture’s account of the human vocation of fruitfulness is that Jesus is the Vine, and that other people are the branches, then the passage in which he makes this claim (John 15:1-17) may be the most pivotal passage for inquiring after the meaning of bearing fruit. Conveniently, Jesus’ two teachings about fruitfulness in relation to his being “the Vine” form an inclusio around, or bookend, Jesus’ solitary explicit endorsement of friendship: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (15:13) This passage has a lot going on.

1. John’s introduction of the concept of friendship is surrounded by a greater discussion of fruitfulness, both in 15:1-8 and again in 15:16.
2. Johannine friendship depends on “love” and “keeping commandments,” introduced in those terms in 13:34-35 and 14:15-15:17, and developed as concepts throughout John with different language.
3. The vocation of “laying down [one’s] life for [one’s] friends,” which is the essence of Johannine friendship, draws directly in Peter’s unfortunate promise in 13:37: “I will lay down my life for you.”
4. The subsequent events in the passion drama demonstrate true and false Johannine friendship. Peter does not lay down his life for his friend, but Jesus does. Meanwhile, Judas lays down his friend for his life. Peter is re-instated with a vocation—“feed my lambs”—that will require laying down his life. Thus Peter’s 13:37 promise finds a fulfillment in his ministry after Jesus’ resurrection.
5. John has clearly connected friendship to death and to fruitfulness, but he has already drawn the third leg of the triangle in 12:20-26, connecting death and fruitfulness to one another: “If [a grain of wheat] dies, it bears much fruit.”

John sees the relationship between friendship, fruitfulness, and death: friends help one another bear fruit; friends lay down their lives for one another; and you have to die in order to bear fruit death. Peter will not bear fruit until he begins his vocation, his Christian ministry.

Christian Ministry: Motherly and Fatherly Toil

Christian ministry recapitulates the toil of the Man and the Woman in the Garden. The Man toils over fruit-bearing plants in the midst of thistles and thorns. Jesus says that the Father toils over his vine and branches, pruning them. In his first Markan parable, Jesus says that, in many places, the seed will spring up among thorns. He describes his disciples’ ministry as entering the Adam-like work of the Father: “Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest… I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

Paul’s life in the flesh “means fruitful labor” in Philippians. He connects the agrarian and fatherly metaphors in 1 Corinthians, as well: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth,” and in the next chapter, “I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel,” bringing fruit forth from them. The false apostles’ work consists in talk only, but Paul’s toilsome labor—“we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands”—consists “in power.” Paul draws these two images together and draws this paradigm out at length in 1 Corinthians 1-4, but especially 4:8-21, from which I have quoted.

The Woman, named “the Mother of All Living,” brings forth fruit not from the ground but from her own body. When Jesus sees the disciples in anguish at his going away, he assures them that the pain is productive by pointing to the toil of childbearing: “When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered her baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has entered the world.” Although he uses these words to assure his disciples, he uses the same words—“the hour has come”—to describe his own anguish.

Paul is perhaps more explicit about the Motherly shape of his own ministry in Galatians, the letter in which he speaks specifically about the fruit of the Spirit. He calls the Galatians “my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” Earlier in the letter, he had chided them for being like the Sarah who tried to build (banaha) a son by her own works, offering Hagar, instead of waiting on God to make her fruitful. Like “the Jerusalem above, [who] is our mother,” Paul claims the Galatians as his children, bearing them as “beloved children,” as they bear Christ.

Both Jesus and Paul found the language of Motherly and Fatherly toil useful in their descriptions of their ministry of bearing fruit and helping others to bear fruit (which might make Christian ministry meta-fruitfulness?). Augustine demonstrated that when spiritual friendship shapes a marriage, those involved will be spiritually fruitful. I hope that I have demonstrated that when spiritual Motherhood and Fatherhood shape individuals, they will become the kinds of people who would lay down their lives for one another, and be spiritual friends.