“People will gather them and throw them into a fire, and they will be burned.” John 15:6

1 May 2024   John 15:1-8  

Black kid dies in Chicago. Black shooter, Black victim. Turf. Gangs. Nobody cares.

White kid dies in southeast Kentucky. Overdose. Fentanyl. Cartels. Nobody cares.

Girl dies in an alley near a bus depot in Compton. Fourteen. Runaway. Hooker. Nobody cares.

John Doe and Jane Doe die uselessly every day. They die all over the world every day – Baltimore, Berlin, Bangkok. San Antonio, Sao Paolo, Shanghai. Nobody knows anything about them, except that they make the kinds of decisions that all useless people make. They are not connected to anything or anyone that gives life, and the same fate awaits them all: “People will gather them and throw them into a fire, and they will be burned” (John 15:6). Note that it isn’t God who throws useless lives into the flames – people are more than happy to do that. God certainly recognizes when a life is dry and shriveled. People do, too. People, however, are happier to regard them as human weeds than God is.

There is a qualitative difference between the way God knows us and the way people do. Socrates, for instance, had a deep knowledge of human beings, and was able to reveal the glittering trivialities that passed in people for real knowledge. Socrates was able to reveal, in other words, our ignorance. Siddhartha Gautama, aka the Buddha, also described a deep truth about people when he taught that we are driven largely by selfish desire, and the life that is most deeply meaningful only emerges when our egoism is submerged in ultimate light. The Buddha, in other words, was able to reveal our selfishness (see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Does Jesus Know Us?, p. 11).

To this we could add the insights of Freud, Jung and countless other psychologists, showing that we are driven by countless irrational forces bubbling cheerfully away under layer upon layer of denial. But is any of that enough? Have we said all that needs to be said when we have exposed all the things that prove our unworthiness? Is there not another kind of knowing that tells not just the truth about what we are, but more importantly the truth about what we can be?

“Whoever remains in Me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without Me you can do nothing” (15:5). With a living connection to Jesus people are not left in Socratic ignorance, or the extinguishing of Self in Nirvana. A living relationship with Jesus means to be wrapped first in forgiveness. We say the same things about our unworthiness that God says (it is the literal meaning of the Greek word meaning “to confess). Then God “throws it away” – the literal meaning of the Greek word meaning “to forgive.” God decides literally to know all that no longer: “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). In place of all that God no longer remembers He places His own life. God knows us, in other words, as intimately and as completely as He knows Himself.

That’s what it means to “remain” in Jesus. People who know that they are known and loved so deeply and intensely cannot help but make other kinds of choices. They cannot help having lives that people care about. They become conduits of that care. They become answers to the questions that have caused anxiety, depression, loneliness, and despair.

There are no more human weeds.