NOTES for Joh 15:1-8
Speaking of the word by which He has cleansed His disciples, Jesus again bears witness to Himself as the living Torah. After all, it was precisely the words of the Torah that people in those days said cleansed a person. Of course, this did not mean memorizing the text of the Pentateuch and repeating it in the hope that the repetition itself would free the one repeating it from all sins. Although there were many people in those days, as indeed there are today, who really did know the Pentateuch by heart among the Jews.
But the point was not to memorize the Pentateuch by heart, but to allow God's commandment to change one's life. First inwardly, and then outwardly as well. The commandment was viewed not simply as some legal or even moral norm, but as a direct revelation of God's will. As God's intention directed toward the human being. It had to be accepted as such, and one's own life had to be built in accordance with it. One's human intentions had to be brought into accord with God's. In those days this was called the inner Torah. The very Torah that cleansed a person. Because it truly became the living word of God, which could cleanse. And Jesus speaks of the cleansing power of His words. Thereby He affirms that every word of His is the word of God. But cleansing through the word alone proves insufficient. One must also preserve an essential unity with Christ; otherwise full life in the Kingdom is impossible. Essential means the kind of unity in which one lives one life with Him.
Like shoots on a grapevine: normal life is possible for them only as long as they remain united with that vine. Yet participation alone is not enough: the same life must also continue in the shoot itself. Dry shoots, like dry branches on trees, are not needed; they are only a burden for the tree or for the vine. It is not enough to be near Jesus and share in His life, not enough to experience the breath of the Kingdom as reality; one must also become oneself a vessel and bearer of this life and this breath.
Of course, the breath of the Kingdom that blows over a person changes him, and a meeting with Christ does not pass without leaving a trace. But if after all this a person does not change inwardly, does not become, in Paul's words, a "temple of the Holy Spirit," a place where the Spirit dwells, then one can say that all the meetings were in vain and the whole experience was wasted. The inner Torah is necessary for a Christian precisely so that what is received in meetings with Christ and in the experience of the Kingdom does not leak out of his soul like water through a sieve. Only in this twofold unity of the Law, the inner Torah, and grace is the life of the Kingdom possible: not episodic and accidental, but full.