Jesus Christ the Appletree
A Field-Grafting Theology of the Crucifixion
Jesus Christ the Appletree: A Field-Grafting Theology of the Crucifixion
Here we are in Holy Week, following Jesus on the way to Golgotha. In a world filled with suffering, we might wonder why the story of salvation has to take this turn, why the Crucifixion is part of what God is doing in the world. I wonder, anyway, even as a preacher and pastor. Seminary didn’t end up providing me with a satisfying theology of Christ’s Passion and death on the Cross. As an Episcopal priest, I lean more into theologies of the Incarnation and the Resurrection in my sermons and in my own prayer life. If you and I are meeting for the first time in these words, I should confess that I bristle at substitutionary atonement and usually settle for but struggle with moral influence theory. As a fruit farmer, though, I’ve encountered something in Creation that helps me not just glimpse but actually gaze on the Mystery of the Crucifixion.
Let me share it with you this Holy Week.
Last May, one of the pear trees near our barn bloomed so gloriously in “springtime dress of leaf and flower” that I photographed it from every angle and posted it on Instagram. The next day, my wife Jen flew home from teaching in California to spend summer, as she does, home at Good Courage. Fresh from the airport, eager to return to the land, she grabbed a saw and—unbeknownst to me—went straight to that tree and began pruning it. Still in bloom.
When I say ‘pruning,’ I mean butchering. When I say ‘saw,’ I mean handheld chainsaw.
Coming in from rounding up ducks in the vineyard, I walked along the bend in the path toward the barn and was met by this sight: every flowering branch of that pear tree in the mud. The trunk remained, hacked and raw, a stump with stubs where branches used to be.
Jen was standing back twelve feet or so from her work, admiring what I could only call carnage.
I lost it.
“Are you out of your mind? That was the most beautiful thing on the whole farm and the first thing you do on arriving is to kill it?” I was yelling through tears.
It wasn’t dead. We both knew that. But I wept anyway. Stomped off and slammed the porch door anyway. I deleted the social media post because I couldn’t bear to see the image or read friends’ and strangers’ comments about its beauty.
What I also knew then was that Jen, my spouse of fifteen years, is a master pruner. I didn’t know at that moment – but might have guessed – that in the barn’s walk-in cooler, she’d saved the best pear scions we’ve grown, planning to graft them onto the sawn-off stump of that vigorous old tree so it might bear better fruit. Fruit that lasts.
I know that Jen’s wise. I know she lives in hope. Still, every spring, I doubt her and all this pruning. Ugh. The loss. The flowers trampled. The stump. It feels like a punch in the gut. Did you have to make that cut? To that tree?
I no longer doubt the grafting, though.
Grafting is miracle work. It’s where our crazy ‘what if?’ human ideas are met by Life’s relentless desire for itself. Nearly every apple you’ve ever eaten was from a grafted tree. In a graft, a grower joins two plants—rootstock and scion—so their living tissues heal together. The rootstock determines hardiness and size. The scion determines fruit. A bit of Honeycrisp twig grafted to a rootstock will still bear Honeycrisp fruit, but the root might make it tolerant of more cold or keep it under 8 feet tall.
Grafting is an existing scriptural image of our life in Christ. Paul draws on the image of a grafted olive tree in his letter to the churches in Rome. He writes of nourishing sap and support flowing to both natural and grafted branches from one root. His point is ecclesial and relational, as he explains to emerging Christian communities — wrestling with exclusiveness, envy, and prideful rejection of the other — how both Jews and Gentiles have come to be part of the Body of Christ. His readers would all have had a basic understanding of the art grafting, so he doesn’t elaborate on how and when the wild and the cultivated varieties become One.
My imagination is less intrigued by Paul’s us/them categories of branches, and more inspired by wondering what grafting might reveal about the mystical union of Christ and the human soul. I’m interested in the how, when, and why of our connection to that nourishing sap. Here’s what I know about the how: The one necessary thing in any kind of grafting: the cambium of both rootstock and scion—the green, vascular layer—must touch. They must fuse together. That thin layer, green like the Holy Spirit according to Hildegard of Bingen, is where life flows. Access to that greenness demands that both rootstock and scion be wounded.
The most extraordinary form of grafting requires the rootstock be gravely wounded, even as to death.
Top-working is extreme grafting. It’s a kind of field grafting that allows a farmer to use an old root and trunk to grow new fruit. Instead of replanting a tree and waiting a decade for it to bear, you cut it down and graft new varieties onto the stump.
At Good Courage, our predecessor farmers did just that. They sawed off the oldest apple tree on the farm—just above knee height—and cut carefully into the bark to insert twigs from a Snowsweet apple. (Snowsweet is a paradisal, flowery-sweet Minnesota variety of apple stays snow white even after being sliced—flesh unstained.) Not every graft took. But some did. And the tree lives again in a different form, bearing lovely fruit on new wood.
I’ve asked Jen to keep that gnarly old Snowsweet. Because in it, I see Christ—crucified and risen.
Top-working is a gamble on life. You only do it when the root is so vigorous it can offer more to a graft than to its old self. And when you long for fruit you haven’t yet tasted enough of. A sliver of scion grafted to that stump grows like it’s powered by every drop of rain and every shaft of sunlight that’s ever fallen on our farm. Jen’s top-grafted pears from two seasons ago are already as tall as ten-year-old trees—and more alive.
So in this way the shadow and the light of the Crucifixion dapples our orchard: To top-graft, you must cut down the tree. Only then can its life-energy surge upward into the tender grafts. That ancient trunk, severed, becomes source. The full force of the earth flows up and out through it into new life.
In the Silo Chapel here, we sing the very old Advent carol, “Jesus Christ the Appletree,” all year round. We’re not the first to liken Christ to a tree that bears fruit. The hymn doesn’t follow the image through Passion and Resurrection—but grafting does.
Why the Cross? Why must Christ be cut down? My best answer used to be: so we could hear the breadth and depth of the words, “Forgive them. They know not what they do.” Those words still save, and I cling to them. But the apple tree offers another glimpse of the Mystery of the Passion: Perhaps Christ is cut down so we all might be top-grafted.
We are fragile twigs. We cannot bear good fruit apart from the One through whom all things were made. We are not hardy enough, rooted enough. But what if a Root—ancient, holy, Spirit-green—were willing to be cut down, that we might be grafted in? What if, as Paul writes to the Romans, “the Root is holy, so then are the branches made holy”? All the branches, all holy.
What if salvation is the work of a God who, like a farmer at the turn of winter into spring, has saved uncountable slips of scionwood, waiting for this right season, longing for sweet fruit?
Well, then. Abiding in Christ the Appletree we might have a chance at bearing the fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.
Then, dear kindred scions, from all of us grafted into the Tree of Life, as the poet Rumi says, “the Friend will have something good to eat.”
In Christ crucified and risen, perhaps God gambled on divine, existential, salvific top-work—so that the sweet potential of our souls might be harvested in this lifetime.
If that’s what the Cross means—axe and graft, death and life—then I can’t help but sing hymns of solemn awe for the One who gave himself for us. I’ll be singing them in our orchard this Holy Week, as the spring sap rises in all that I see.
This idea of grafting provides the clarity I've often sought regarding baptism. I've always winced/quinced at the notion that our births alone are not sufficient evidence of being part of the God's family, regardless of our brokenness. But with the sacrament of grafting, the distinction between birth and rebirth is blurred and honored. It is an act that connects birth and death and resurrection. Thank you for this Midwest midwifery, this Midwistery on the Mystery of baptism and crucifixion, Kerri. Peace.
Lovely and illuminating