Today's Devotion

Monday, June 15, 2026 - John 15:12-27

In the name of + Jesus. Amen.

Our Lord commands His disciples to “love one another” even as He has loved us. For love focuses on the beloved, and not on the self. Our Lord loves His disciples even above His own life. And our Lord uses an image of life and how life is transferred by using the image of the grape vine. For the vine spreads out new life through its branches. And those branches, in turn, bear fruit. Where life is productive, where there is a solid connection between vine and branch, the result will be fruit that “should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He may give it to you.”

There is an organic connection between the Christ and the Christian, between the substance of life from the vine, to the branch, to the fruit – which not only feeds creation and makes “wine to gladden the heart of man” (Ps 104:15), but also produces multiplicative seeds – which in turn follow the instructions embedded in the order of creation by their very DNA to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28). New disciples are added to the fold by means of the love of Christ spreading out through fruit-bearing branches. And the fruit that our Lord uses as an illustration is the very fruit that He chose to use to be His blood in the Sacrament of the Altar, after the fruit has been put through the ordeal of pressing.

The relationship of love between the vine and the branch, between the Christ and the Christian, impels Jesus to call us “friends.” For in Him, by His blood, through His life, and by His love, we are no longer enemies with God, but are reconciled (Eph 2:16).

And this contrasts sharply with the world. For both Christ and Christian are hated: “If the world hates you,” says our Lord, “know that it has hated Me before it hated you.” Instead of a vine bringing life to its branches, the devil, the world, and our sinful nature bring death. For the world resents that Jesus “chose [us] out of the world,” and we “are not of the world.” And what’s more, “Whoever hates [Jesus] hates [His] Father also.” And this fulfills the prophecy of the Psalm (35:19): “They hated Me without a cause.”

But once again, we see the love of God flowing from the Trinity, as our Lord shows how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are united to draw us out of death to life: “When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth, who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness about Me.” And just as the branch grows from the vine, Jesus says: “And you will also bear witness, because you have been with Me from the beginning.”

Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.