Vigils Reading – 27th Sunday

A reading from

ST BASIL THE GREAT

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You need only look at the vine to be reminded of your own nature, that is,

if you observe it intelligently. No doubt you remember the image used by the

Lord in which he says that he is the vine and the Father the vinedresser. Each of

us who have been grafted onto the Church by faith he calls branches, and he

urges us to bear much fruit so as not to be rejected as useless and thrown into

the fire.

Throughout the Scriptures the Lord continually likens human souls to

vines. He says for instance: My beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hillside; and

again: I planted a vineyard and put a hedge around it. Clearly it is human souls

that he calls his vineyard, and the hedge he has put round them is the security of

his commandments and the protection of the angels; for the angel of the Lord

will encamp around those who fear him. Moreover, by establishing in the

Church apostles in the first place, prophets in the second, and teachers in the

third, he has surrounded us as though by a firmly planted palisade.

In addition, the Lord has raised our thoughts to heaven by the examples

of saints of past ages. He has kept them from sinking to the earth where they

would deserve to be trampled on, and he wills that the bonds of love, like the

tendrils of a vine, should attach us to our neighbors and make us rest on them,

so that always climbing upward like the vines growing on trees, we may reach

the loftiest heights.

He also requires that we allow ourselves to be weeded. To be spiritually

weeded means to have renounced worldly ambitions that burdened our hearts.

Anyone who has renounced the love of material things and attachment to

possessions, or who has come to regard as despicable and deserving of

contempt the poor, wretched glory of this world, is like a weeded vine. Freed

from the profitless burden of earthly aspirations, that person can breathe again.

Finally, following out the implications of the comparison, we must not

run to wood, or, in other words, show off or seek the praise of outsiders. Instead,

we must bear fruit by reserving the display of our good works for the true vine

dresser.