A year ago this month, I moved house, and found myself the keeper of a vine. I say keeper, not owner, because of the responsibility and relationship involved—topics I bring to this writing. As I’ve tended to it, relaxed or sheltered under it, and now harvested fruit from it, I’ve found myself returning repeatedly to vines in the New Testament, and what this meeting point between past and present can teach me about my faith in action.
Vines are a prominent gospel topic, but perhaps one that might not feel especially relatable to many Christians, given the geographical limitations of where vines grow. In what follows, I want to explore what unexpectedly finding it tangibly relatable has meant to me, opening new ways of reflecting on Christian life and the vine as a metaphor for this.
My vine as I found it flourishing, but without much fruit – photograph by the author
Vines and vineyards feel central to the New Testament. It is too easy, however, to feel that the world of any historical Jesus is impossibly far-removed from 21st century Western culture. We may be left feeling that trying to live in accordance with its context is absurd, as the world is just too different now. We may feel, conversely, that we need to be so metaphorical about its application to modern life that the distinction between narrative and parable disintegrates, or that there is so much room for subjectivity that meaningful interdenominational dialogue and ethical application become impossible.
I did not expect to find a healthy vine over a pergola in middle England, and immediately felt like I was in the Mediterranean. It’s given me a point of connection with the Holy Land, but in its unexpectedness, also challenged me to consider why I ever needed that, and reminded me how many ways of reading the New Testament there are. The New Testament references to vines are predominantly in the synoptic gospels (Matthew 26:29, Mark 14:25, Luke 22:18); moreover, it is not just in parables, but taken further by John as a way to describe our relationship with Christ (John 15). I am taking this as an invitation to use the gospels as a starting point reflecting further on viticulture and Christian life.
So, what have I learned from my vine? It grows at an alarming rate, and requires regular attention. The tendrils come off in all directions, and twist around everything, gripping tightly. For me, that’s meant untangling them from next door’s washing line. If ever there was a plant that symbolised our tightly-woven interconnectedness, the vine seems to fit the brief. The new shoots need to grip the right things to grow healthily and stand any chance of bearing good fruit. If we find ourselves condemning rotten fruit, consider what support we’ve given the source (Matthew 7:16-17).
Interwoven tendrils on my vine – photograph by the author
Considering this interconnectedness, just as we are not individuals in isolation, so the New Testament was not a text composed in isolation from the rest of its cultural context. We may find we bring more to, and get more from, our reading of the New Testament if we remember that vine imagery abounded in the ancient world. Lucian, a first-century satirist, writes about a world with a river of wine whose source is grape juice dripping from vines. Men, intoxicated from the river, meet creatures who are women from the waist up, but vines below. When they try to have intercourse with the women, they transform into entangled vines themselves, coining a term “ampelomixia” (used only here, “mixing with vines”, Verae Historiae 1.9). A comical story, which subverts, for example, the more beautiful metamorphosis of Baucis and Philemon (Ovid Metamorphoses 8:611-724), I read the New Testament alert to how the vines might embody desire, danger, and interdependence.
So what of being the branches on Jesus’ vine (John 15:5)? I’m not sure there even are “branches” when it comes to vines, and certainly not until the vines are slightly older. Our offspring need to cling tightly to us to achieve that status, to mature into their roles within the body of Christ. The tendrils do not come out in regular patterns, but become an interconnected, messy web, which feels like it does indeed mirror the tangled complexity of human interactions. We may be dependent on the Christ-branch that is the root and source of nourishment, but we are inseparably interconnected as a community, for good, and indeed ill. The tendrils may overwhelm with their intense grip if not managed carefully. Relationships may be strongly-forged, and hard to break without damage to the whole. It can be hard to know what to prune, as one risks severing important links rather than chance entanglements. There is strength here, but also warnings, about proper relationship, including with the produce, that is, the grapes.
The aftermath of the harvest! – photograph by the author
My grapes were prolific this year. The extraordinary heatwaves we experienced in the UK helped the grapes to become particularly sweet. When they were first growing, any movement resulted in a shower of tiny grapes falling from the vine. I knew I needed to thin them, but also feared losing my crop if I unwittingly allowed too many to fall. I didn’t yet have skill or knowledge, and was reminded how much our world will always depend on human skill and judgement, whatever happens with machines.
I harvested 35kg to take to a wine collective, with roughly the same amount left; from just one vine, this is an extraordinary haul. I didn’t know the variety, and only one (Rondo) would be used to make red wine. The rest would contribute to a more generic rose. Either would have been fine, but I was interested to find out more. I didn’t even know if they were red wine grapes; skin colour is not, I now know, a predictor of juice colour. The people who collected my harvest considered factors including the size of my grapes (smaller than others), the colour of the flesh and juice (red), the taste, and judged that they were almost certainly Rondo. The skin colour was not a reflection of the grape’s nature. The size was not a predictor of its value. Grapes began to feel like an excellent metaphor for humans.
An abundance of grapes – photograph by the author
My vine is about nine years old. My success this year is predicated on the previous owners’ foresight and hard work. Friends have shared that their vines have yet to produce anything, or produce very limited amounts. How much of my vine was luck, how much care and judgement? It was a stark reminder that I can’t control nature, but I can work with it.
Harvesting the grapes was itself an unexpectedly thought-provoking experience. Physically hard work (consider Matthew 20:1-16), I was tangibly reminded of the effort that goes into sustaining my life. In some cases, the simplest option was to cut off a “branch”, and then cut the fruit from it. That felt vicious, but became its own form of pruning, which would ultimately support vine growth while speeding up my harvest; work with nature and it will serve you well. Pruning like this felt more supportive than destructive, and countered a recently dark sermon I’d heard on the need for the pain of being pruned.
The wine collective to whom I was taking grapes had asked for “bunches only”. But what constitutes a bunch? What did that mean for the lone grapes / small clusters? They had to be mould-free; one mouldy grape disqualified the whole bunch. They all needed to be ripe, but not all grapes in a bunch had ripened at an even rate. What was I to do about the bunches where a couple had stayed green, or conversely, begun to shrivel? Again, the relationship between individual and community, and the challenges in making good judgements about how to work in a community’s best interests were obvious. Here, I was brutally utilitarian, taking only those bunches that would serve the purpose of making good wine. As a Christian, I would not take such an approach more broadly. I did, however, then consider further why I was harvesting them, or indeed leaving them. I’ve left many. Birds and animals are welcome to them. I’ll eat some. I’ll put some in my compost to help feed future plants. Some will remain on the vine and simply wither away. There’s a role for all of them. There’s a role for all of us.
Grapes ripening unevenly – photograph by the author
The better bunches were on the top of the pergola. These may have flourished due to being better protected; new tendrils had grown over them as shelter. They were also, however, much harder to access, and much more likely to have rotted in their stationary positions. Protection and lack of challenge may not have produced the best overall results, and certainly left some produce inaccessible in the first place. I reflected on how, as Christians, we grow by weathering the storm and not only relying on others for shelter. It also seemed to exemplify how a privileged space may enable one to flourish, but to no avail, resulting in wasted potential.
Grapes sheltered by new vine growth – photograph by the author
I’ve also visited Chateau Musar, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. Part of the biblical landscape, this valley has produced excellent wine for millennia, (if only since 1930 for Musar), marking both continuity and discontinuity. A vine ages much more quickly than, say the cedars of Lebanon (Psalms 29, 72, 92, 104, 148 for example), and will not always produce great fruit. Albeit referring to figs (Luke 13:6-9), we are reminded of the need for patience around nature, but also for understanding the natural order of things; fig trees just don’t produce fruit in the first few years, and grapevines have limited lifespans. The knowledge of how to tend them, however, needs to be handed down, and the ground and environment kept appropriate for them to flourish.
At the time of writing, the Bekaa Valley would not be safe for me to visit. The friend I visited there came to see me this summer; we drank Musar together, and thought about Bekaa. The land will remain. Drinking the wine is a homage to that past. I remembered the stone jars in which it was kept, and Cana (John 2:1-12). I remembered the barrels in which it was aged, and thought of the need for appropriate storage (old wine in new wineskins, Matthew 9:17, Mark 2:22). The production and consumption of wine brings together collective endeavours in harmony with landscape and climate, reliant on political stability.
Wine jars and barrels at Chateau Musar – photographs by the author
A bottle of wine requires about 1.5kg of grapes. I understand top vines in commercial vineyards may only be allowed to yield a bottle’s worth of grapes from each vine. The fruit is thinned to ensure only the best remains. My 35kg will yield around 24 bottles of wine, to be collected next summer, a less robust vintage, but I was so excited to have this opportunity, and this year seems to have been so good for the fruit, that I’m maximising it. Exuberance and inexperience may have overridden wisdom, but I chose not to care, this time. If I want to drink wine now, it will be the fruits of others’ labour (I bought some of the 2022 red to test it out). When I collect my own, I will be sharing it. I couldn’t possibly drink that much alone; again, community is essential.
Becoming a wine-producing vine-owner gave me a new way to read the New Testament. Parables grounded in nature do not just provide easy parallels for those who know about the content (potentially excluding those who do not). They also invite us to acknowledge how much our faith is rooted (yes, rooted), in real-world action, reaction, collaboration, and community. Christianity is not just a religion of the book, but of relationship with the world in action. Jesus as the Word incarnate has already shown us this; John’s metaphor of the vine helps make the point. Jesus may be the vine, but the matured juice of its produce yields the wine with which we celebrate the Eucharistic feast. He becomes both the source and product, drawing us together in so doing.
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