He taught-- “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. “Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.
The Father is the vineyard owner (vinedresser/vinekeeper/gardener).
The Christ (Jesus) is the vine.
You (we) are the branches.
In terms of seeds and plants and fruit and seasons you might understand it in that context. But that's just a way of looking at it. We can all understand that a seed is planted, grows, flowers and produces fruit that has seed in it. The first fruits of a growing season are set aside and preserved so that no matter what disaster may come later, there are seeds set apart to begin again. Only a fool sets nothing aside, and instead consumes everything he grows thinking "I'll set some seed aside later for next year." Then locusts come and destroy his crop, or hail strikes the plants down before they even flower, or floods wash everything away and he has nothing stored away for spring planting and a new season. He is ruined.
With seeds and such we understand the natural concept of seasons. We understand easily because we see it with our own eyes. It's not sad, or bad to think that from the very moment those seeds were set in soil it was for one purpose only-- that is, with the hope and expectation that they will produce fruit and also- within that idea the greater purpose is that it might be good fruit, pleasing, nourishing, satisfying and so on-- because from the outset it was grown for consumption. Not shocking when we think about grapes, for example. The grapes are grown because the Vineyard Owner knows that after the growing season, the grapes will be harvested, gathered, washed, and crushed and from that crushing the blood of the grape will flow freely and from that, another process that produces good wine. That wine and the hope that it will be good is the very reason that the seeds were planted in the earth.
All of this is natural and expected and good because it is by design and as intended by the Creator. It all becomes unsettling when we apply the key that was given and that parable he explained to mean that the seed was the word and the soil was man. In another parable he puts the same idea in terms of this vine that has grown in soil and produced many branches, some that produce fruit and some do not. The ones that produce fruit are pruned so they become even more productive, the ones that produce no fruit are cut off entirely and destroyed.
This is figurative language, not intended to explicitly detail how everything works. It's used to convey an idea of how things work. Yet, scripture is consistent in this regard. When scripture tells us that we come from the soil, in essence that we physically come from the earth-- from dirt- Adam, Jesus doesn't contradict the idea... When he explains the parable, it's clear- we are the soil that he describes. We are the soil in the vineyard. It's humbling. Yet the seed and the soil alike though they are common- there is something miraculous that occurs and this is something we call LIFE.
