The True Vine Discourse in the Gospel of John

In the Gospel of John, on the night before his death, Jesus tells his disciples, I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. Every branch in me that bears no fruit he cuts off, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. The image runs through John 15:1 to 15:8, one of the longest sustained metaphors in the Gospel. Jesus tells the disciples to remain in him as a branch remains in the vine, since a branch cannot bear fruit by itself and neither can a disciple bear fruit apart from him. Whoever remains in me and I in him bears much fruit, apart from me you can do nothing. A branch that does not remain is thrown away and withers, gathered up and burned. The discourse ties the vine image to two further claims in the same passage, that the Father is glorified when the disciples bear much fruit, and that remaining in Christ means remaining in his love and keeping his commands, above all to love one another as he has loved them. Grapevines were the most familiar cultivated plant in first century Judea, so the image would have been immediately legible to its first hearers, and it draws on an older biblical figure of Israel itself as a vine planted and tended by God, found in the prophets and the psalms, which the Gospel reworks around the person of Jesus rather than the nation.