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The Sixth Sunday of Easter Almighty God, the breeze of your love and grace is ever blowing; may we set our sails to capture that breeze, and may it inspire these words and those who hear them. Amen Do you remember your first “best friend?” I do. We met the summer I moved to Virginia, and we bonded over Barbie dolls. We were in the same Girl Scout troop, we rode bikes together after school; in the summer we spent countless hours at the neighborhood pool and then camped out in her back yard. As we moved into junior high we shared our burgeoning interest in boys and clothes; we cried over sad movies, and played poker on her front porch. And when I moved to another state, we wrote long letters and visited each other during summer vacation. It’s been many years since I last saw my first best friend, but when I recall that friendship I am still filled with the feelings of comfort and reassurance and fun, and yes, even joy, that it brought me. Having a friend means having someone to turn to, no matter what, someone to confide in, someone to trust and rely on. True friends are self-giving. They are not manipulative or two-faced. They are not judgmental or conditional. True friends are a treasure, and l ike the friendships I have now, the relationship with my first best friend made me truly wealthy in all that matters in this world. In today’s gospel we hear Jesus call his disciples “friends.” Throughout the gospels we’re presented with many images of Jesus: We see him as a preacher and teacher, and as a healer; we hear him refer to himself as “Son of God” and “Son of Man,” and we hear others identify him as “Messiah.” Over the last couple of weeks we’ve heard Jesus describe himself metaphorically as the good shepherd and the true vine. All of these ways of seeing Jesus help us understand who he is and what that means for us, but they also set Jesus apart, emphasizing his divinity, his God-ness. But when Jesus calls his disciples friends, he changes the focus—underscoring his humanity and defining his relationship with those around him in a very real and tangible way. John's gospel is replete with Jesus' assurances of his love for his disciples and commands for his followers to love others, but only in this passage does Jesus complicate matters by calling the disciples friends. I say "complicate" because even though we recognize friendship as something quite special, something to be valued, paradoxically we also tend to make a qualitative distinction between friendship and love; we speak of being “just friends” as if friendship is something "less" than love -- less intense, less invested. In fact, friendship makes a different sort of demand on us. While love seems to be or not be, friendship implies more choice. We love our children, our siblings, our parents just because we are in relationship with them. We speak of falling in love with our spouse or partner as something that seems somehow out of our control. But friendship is different. It is rarely as instinctive as a parent's love for a child, nor is it as involuntary as falling in love seems to be. Real friendship, mature friendship is intentional; it takes work, and requires commitment -- even to be friends with those whom we love. Jesus calls his disciples friends, and in doing so, he upsets the teacher-pupil relationship they have established, he breaks boundaries, and he brings a radical new dimension to the bond they have formed. No longer are they master and servant. Instead they are "friends," with all that entails. And friendship in the first-century Mediterranean world was a serious matter. To be considered a friend was to be in a position of honor. Being a friend meant being treated as kin with all the familial obligations. To be a friend meant to look out for the welfare of the other, to put the other's needs on an equal footing with one's own. Friendship implied reciprocity as well -- to consider someone a friend meant counting on that person to return that level of concern and care. When Jesus calls the disciples "friends" he is upping the ante, and he is letting them know what he expects of their relationship. He has shared with them what the Father has revealed to him, and now he is entrusting them with the responsibility of going out and sharing this revelation with the world. This pronouncement must have come as a surprise to the disciples. In many ways they related to Jesus as a child to a parent -- questioning, seeking approval, wanting to be cared for. You don't have to spend much time with young children to discover that their ideas about friendship are limited, too. As loving and empathic as young children can be, their view of friendship is basically self-centered. There is a "tit for tat" quality to their friendships -- "I'll be your friend as long as you're nice to me" -- and a certain temporariness and interchangeability about them -- whoever is close by at the moment can be my friend. It's easy to imagine that despite the status of friendship in the culture, the disciples who related to Jesus as a parent or master still saw what Jesus was offering in an immature way, still worried about how they were going to be cared for, still worried about what was in it for them. So I'm not sure that the disciples were comforted or reassured by Jesus calling them "friends." Nor am I sure that they were ready to be friends in return. Nonetheless, in calling them friends Jesus expanded how the disciples might understand their relationship with him, and through him, their relationship with God. Not only were the disciples loved unconditionally as a parent loves a child, but also they were held as friends -- not as children, not as servants, but as chosen ones who could be relied on, counted on, trusted. Friendship with Jesus would be friendship held to its highest level. Like the disciples, Jesus calls us as friend. At first this might sound as shocking to us as it likely did to the twelve. But rather than diminishing our relationship with Jesus, or simply making Jesus our “buddy” or our “homeboy,” as popular culture might see it, considering Jesus, in all his humanity and all his divinity, to be a friend can expand and elevate what that relationship means, and make it real for us in a fresh new way. To be a true friend is to care about someone without regard to the cost to oneself, without regard for any possible return on the investment, and there is no question that Jesus does that for us. As Jesus’ friends, we are called to love Jesus in that same abundant way—without thought of what it might cost us—and we are called to take that love back out into the world and share it with others. Just as Jesus broke down boundaries by calling his disciples friends, so too are we called to reach out in friendship to those around us, breaking down those boundaries that set us apart, and divide us into in-groups and out-groups. When we do this, when we let down our guard and truly reach out in friendship to all—rich and poor, young and hold, those near and dear to us and those we find hard to love--we may be surprised to see the face of Jesus in unexpected places and to experience glimpses of the Kingdom of God in our most quotidian encounters. When we reach out in friendship and love just as Jesus reaches out to us, we gain true treasure beyond compare; we become wealthy indeed. Amen. |
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