Fifth Sunday of Easter: We Must become Fruitful Branches

Our Lord makes a distinction between the branches that bear fruit and the branches that don’t bear fruit. We can say that what doesn’t bear fruit is under the dominance of death. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the blossom if that beauty will not last and bring us peace and closeness to Our Risen Lord and God.

Our Lord Jesus Christ also makes a very clear distinction between the branches which bear “much fruit” because through them circulates his blood of life and the branches that do not bear fruit because they lack life in Christ. It is a very sad verdict: There are people that lack this interior principal to animate their lives. They are governed from the exterior. Their unorganized impulses are manipulated by others.

The amazing good news of Waster is based on the truth that Jesus comes to save us from a life without life. He is now our life.

Let’s go a little deeper into this, ‘to bear fruit’ according to today’s reading: ‘Let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth’. St. Catherine of Siena said once that “words without works and concrete actions are like the leaves of the trees; they will not satisfy the farmer. The farmer wants to see fruits, works, actions.”

Lord, thank you for granting me the opportunity to be with you. There are things in life, Lord, that attract me, but you attract me more. I hope in you, and I love you. Maybe I don’t really understand what it means to love, and maybe I don’t love the way I should, but I do love you.

Sacred Heart of Jesus, help me to grow in my interior life, so I can remain united to you

Lord, it is easy to trust what I can see, feel and touch. It is wiser, infinitely wiser to trust you, even if you are hidden from me for now.