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The Sunday lectionary reading for Easter 5 in Year B is Jesus’ teaching that he is the true vine in John 15.1–8. It is a striking and memorable image that has three different elements of context to consider, and it reiterates themes from earlier in the Farewell Discourse as well as picking up ideas that were first sown at the beginning of the gospel narrative.

The previous chapter ends with Jesus inviting the disciples to ‘Rise, let us go from here,’ which appears to look forward to John 18.1, when together they ‘go out’ across the Kidron Valley to Gethsemane. In a previous generation of scholarship, this was seized upon to demonstrate that the final editor was using two separate sources, which he had clumsily stitched together leaving this obvious error, so that the second half of the Farewell Discourse was originally unconnected to the first half. But this assume that editors are stupid, and commentators from 1,800 years or more later are far smarter, and can spot things that the stupid editor didn’t notice! It also fails to take into account that the style is continued seamlessly between the two parts of the material, and even that the second half repeats, reiterates and develops themes from the first half, so they are well integrated together.

There are two common alternative explanations for the phrase at John 14.31. Either Jesus urges them all to leave, but in fact continues in discussion, much as when at a dinner party someone says ‘We really must be going…’ but continues engrossed in conversation. Or they really do leave the upper room, and Jesus’ teaching in John 15–16 and the prayer in John 17 take place as they wander across the city. (Tradition has it that the upper room was located in the south-west corner of Jerusalem, and the crossing to Gethsemane is on the central east side.) This would allow Jesus actually to look up to heaven as described in John 17.1, since they are now out of doors, and it would mean that ‘going out’ across the Kidron Valley in John 18.1 is going out of the city, not going out of the room.