The priority and cost of fruitfulness

We often ask what God wants for us. Even if he doesn’t often tell us the details, we can be sure, whatever our vocation, location, time in history, personality and gifts, that he desires us to become fruitful. He is the one who is life itself, the great I AM, and in sharing his life with us, he desires not only that we live with him but also that we become a source of life for others, imparting to them the gifts we have received through both physical and spiritual means.

Most fundamentally, we think of the role of parents cooperating with God in bringing forth life, but co-creation with God can also extend to our work, relationships and spiritual life as we use our creativity and free choice to draw forth the potential latent within God’s created works.

We might even say that our life comes down to a fundamental decision—will we cooperate with God to become fruitful?

We might wonder why anyone would refuse to pass on the gift of life, yet, for so many reasons, we withhold, whether through fear or selfishness, stopping short of God’s fundamental plan for us.

The first words spoken by God to humanity reflect this primal calling: “Be fruitful” (Gen 1:28). The Creator wants his creatures to share in the gift of bringing forth life, which God immediately explains through the next word of the command: “multiply.” As God’s stewards, this fruitfulness should extend to the earth itself, with human work drawing forth its potential. As humans “fill the earth and subdue it,” they not only bring more human beings into the world but adorn it with the works of human culture.

God desires life for his creatures. Humans are fruitful by drawing forth the potential within all things.

The devil, however, desires death for God’s works. Rather than fostering the true potential of things, he seeks to thwart it in prideful rebellion, unwilling to receive life from another and, therefore, unable to give it. He drew our first parents into his rebellion against God’s plan, twisting God’s words so that Adam and Eve grasped after life, seeking immediate power rather than embracing patient and obedient work. Sin impairs the human mission to be fruitful, as it divides man and woman and even strains the ability to bring forth fruit from the earth, with thorns and weeds rising up to thwart man’s work.

Jesus is the one who restores human fruitfulness, enabling us to do what God desired from the beginning. John’s Gospel demonstrates how Jesus completes the work of creation, even beginning with a clear parallel to the opening verse of the creation story of Genesis: “In the beginning.” The salvation Jesus works in us overcomes the sterility and barrenness of our souls, the weeds sown by the devil and all that would choke out or seize the seed he plants. He feeds us with his own flesh and enlivens us with his breath, his divine Spirit that dwells within us. He truly inaugurates a new creation from within the first, transforming and elevating it by his grace, symbolized by the water made into wine at Cana.

At the Last Supper, Jesus calls his Father a farmer, usually translated as vine dresser. He describes how much it is a mark of his disciples, those who follow after him, to bear fruit: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither; people will gather them and throw them into a fire and they will be burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you. By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples” (Jn 15:5–8).

There is much that we can do to cultivate our interior lives, improving the soil of our souls by rooting out vice and forming virtue, but ultimately, God is the cultivator. The Father, the great farmer, cuts away and prunes in order to bring forth greater life: “He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and every one that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit.” (John 15:2). If someone is close to God, he will produce fruit. And it will hurt, which is why we often resist his work.

As fallen human beings, we want life without death and fruit without sacrifice. Jesus teaches us, however, that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit” (Jn 12:24). The Cross is the greatest fruit of Jesus’ ministry, culminating in the new creation of his Resurrection. He proves to us that by surrendering to the Father’s hand and the difficult work of pruning he undertakes in us, we will die, but that this dying to self will ultimately bring us to new life, to the fruit we were created to bear.

Bearing fruit for God requires patience and endurance because we may not see the results immediately or even at all in this life. People often say they don’t know why or how anyone would have large families anymore. It’s just too much effort or too expensive. Why would anyone accept a celibate vocation? Why would anyone embrace a lower-paying career, like teaching, when there are so many more lucrative options?

As Christians, we have to be countercultural. As we discern how we can follow God’s commandment to bear fruit, Jesus invites us into the logic of the Cross, through which short-term sacrifice bears fruit that lasts into eternal life.