JESUS SPEAKS TO
THE DISCIPLES:
Have
patience, my grapes, it is I who will bear you to term. At first you did not seem much more than tiny
acrid skins, hanging underexposed in the shade of the leaves – a scared little
crew. You did not yet believe in me, and
you worriedly conjectured how you would nourish yourselves with the scarce rain
and deprived of the sun. And you did not
know that all power wells up from within, from me. Without me you can do nothing. I do not say little, I
say nothing. But whoever remains in me and I remain in
him, he is the one who brings in much fruit.
I myself bring forth fruit in him, and he is the fruit. It is just in this that my Father is glorified: that you bring in much fruit.
Whoever
believes in me, whoever eats and drinks me, has life in himself, eternal life,
already here and now, and I will raise him up on the last day. Do you grasp this mystery? You live, work, suffer; and yet, it is not
you: it is another who lives, works, and
suffers in you. You are the ripening
fruit, but what brings the ripening about, what ripens: it is I who am that. I am the power, the fullness, that sheds
itself into your emptiness, filling it up.
But by filling, the fullness fulfills itself in the emptiness, and thus
you are also my fullness.
My
grace is always fruitful,
and my gift is for you to pass my grace on.
JESUS SPEAKS TO THE FATHER:
Thus
do I blossom before you, Father, and for you I bear the world’s
vine-branches. You recognize the life
that flows in my boughs: it is your own
life with me. What flows down into me
vertically from you, my Source, this I have spread far and wide horizontally
over the earth’s expanse. And what was
our eternal life, shared by both of us horizontally, up above in the circle of
eternity, this have I brought down vertically to the very depths of the earth.
--Hans Urs van
Balthasar,
Heart of the World,
chapter
4, The Father’s Vineyard
Image source: Icon of Christ the True Vine, late 20th
century, Dormition Convent
