NOTES for Joh 15:1-8
Speaking of the word by which He cleansed His disciples, Jesus again bears witness to Himself as the living Torah. It was precisely about the words of the Torah in those days that people said they cleanse a person. The point, of course, was not to memorize the text of the Pentateuch and repeat it in the hope that the repetition itself would free the one repeating it from all sins. Although among Jews there were many people in those days, as there are today, who truly knew the Pentateuch by heart.
But the point was not to memorize the Pentateuch, but to let God's commandment change one's life. First the inner life, and then the outer one. The commandment was seen not simply as some legal or even moral norm, but as the direct revelation of God's will. As God's intention addressed to a person. It had to be accepted as such, and one's own life had to be built in accordance with it. One had to bring one's human intentions into agreement with God's. In those days this was called the inner Torah. The very one 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. By this He affirms that every word of His is the word of God. But cleansing through the word alone proves insufficient. One must also preserve essential unity with Christ; otherwise full life in the Kingdom is impossible. Essential unity means the kind in which one lives one life with Him.
Like shoots on a grapevine: normal life for them is possible only as long as they remain united with that vine. Yet participation alone is not enough; that 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 a vessel and bearer of this life and this breath.
Of course, both the breath of the Kingdom that surrounds a person and the encounter with Christ change him, and neither passes without a trace. But if after all this the person does not change inwardly and does not himself become, in Paul's words, a "temple of the Holy Spirit," a place where the Spirit abides, then one can say that all the encounters came to nothing and the whole experience was wasted. This is why the Christian needs the inner Torah: so that what is received in encounters with Christ and in the experience of the Kingdom does not run 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.