delivered 17 May 2009
by Rev. Dr John Evans
Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17
Jesus says to his disciples while they share the last supper:
“You are my friends if you do what I command you.”
And of course what he had commanded them to do was, ‘to love one another’ as he had loved them (John 15:14).
Friendship is an interesting model or foundation on which to build the church. In the preceding chapters of John, Jesus has referred to the relationship between himself and his followers like a shepherd and their sheep; a vine and its branches – and now, you are my friends. There we go – the church as a group of mates, and Jesus is just one of the mates!
I think we Australians actually are quite attracted to such a model, and we can understand it. In fact we most probably would think that is how it should be, quite naturally. There is still enough of our mateship ethos around, as I believe was evident during the recent bushfires, to see this is how we as Australians might understand the church.
However, to Jesus’ hearers, and to the readers of the gospel, this church of friends would have been very strange. All sorts of power imbalances would have come to mind, and it would have certainly challenged the then acceptable social order. However, before we all can feel very self righteous, that this is really how we like to see ourselves in the Uniting Church, or here at Church of All Nations, there are a couple stings in the tail of this image.
First of all, who really are our friends? What really is friendship today? Are we really just very well connected, lonely people? We don’t have a deep relationship, but we have lots of them. Today we can be in contact with half the universe, instantly, through the various social networking opportunities available on the internet like Facebook . . . and of course text messages. But even there I understand there is a limit on how many contacts you can actually effectively and realistically maintain. I think the figure is around 180.
And certainly that figure accords with the experience of physical communities. In a university residential college, if you push much beyond that figure, you are not personally going to know everyone in that college, and you will lose the collegial atmosphere. It is no accident that places like Oxford and Cambridge have lots of quite small colleges; and they are vastly different to, say, a College Square, with its 1,000 residents just over the way.
In congregations, there is also a magic number around this figure, in which you move from being able to “know everyone”, to just sticking to the people you do know. People who study these things see that there is a barrier to moving from such a size to a much bigger size – and perhaps, why would you?
At the end of the day, friendship is not about quantity, but quality. And without wanting to sound ‘cute’ about friendship – like those ‘thought for the day’ emails one often gets — I think we intuitively know what is true friendship.
There remains one feature of friendship that is critical. We choose our friends. As the joke says – we can choose our friends, but we are stuck with our relatives. Friends are part of our life of freedom and form a part of our own identity. We can choose with whom we associate and who we have as our friends. There is huge angst within our lives if we choose to have a person as a friend, and they reject us. Friendship, by definition, is consensual. Mates choose to be mates and it can be very hard for outsiders.
Jesus, still using friendship as a model for his followers, makes a very significant point, a critical change to this:
“You did not choose me, but I chose you.” (15:16)
These friends, are not friends together because they choose to be together – Jesus has chosen them, and their friendship, at least in the first instance, is with him. One only has to reflect on the motley and varied group Jesus was actually speaking with. A couple of fisherman, a tax collector – that lackey of imperial forces — a zealot or political radical if you will, and so on. . . and that is not considering their different personalities or family, religious or educational backgrounds. And this was just the inner circle. What of the women who followed Jesus; and perhaps they were even there at that last supper, and have just got written out of the story?
This turns on its head a consumerist model of friendship, certainly a consumerist model of the church. In God’s own time, and in God’s own way, we are called together, here now. For our relationship with each other is that we have Christ as a friend – and this throws us into relationship with many other people with whom we would never otherwise normally relate. And how we cope with that of course comes down to the command to love one another – but more of that later. For the time being, friendship is all about our relationship with Jesus. And this itself has several implications.
We are friends with Jesus – not his servants, but his friends. Why? Because Jesus “has made known to us everything I have heard from the Father” (15:15). Elsewhere he says he abides in us, and we in him. It is the vine and the branches again. Where do they begin and end?
We are given an insight into God’s will. There is nothing more for him to tell or do. A friend, a real friend, is told and is aware of everything. Nothing is hidden in a true friendship – unlike what may be hidden between a boss and his or her workers. A friend knows it all. And Jesus, for those whom he has called – has revealed it all. He sums it up in this section of the discourse:
“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (15:13)
To use a phrase from my ministers’ retreat: ‘It is all about grace.’ It is this sort of love that Jesus encourages, indeed commands those whom he has chosen, to extend and show among themselves. Here is the great new commandment: “love one another as I have loved you.” Indeed it almost sounds like it is a condition of his friendship that we love one another.
Now there are problems here, and the major one is that this seems to be saying that the love shown by those who follow Christ is to be shared and given only to those, if you like, who are within the church. The command is to love one another – what about all those in need beyond the church? There is an uneasy insularity about all of this.
During the week we have been horrified and appalled at the Four Corners revelations about sexual abuse within rugby league. Even as of today, we do not know who was involved. No-one has ‘owned up’ and addressed the situation. Matthew Johns has taken the rap for his friends. Is this what Jesus is talking about? … laying down life for his friends?
I would submit that a friendship turned inward becomes a conspiracy.
As principal of a university college I was constantly up against this noble logic. When there was some misdemeanour in the college – “Dr Evans, you would want us to be loyal to our mates, wouldn’t you?” The truth of course was that others had been hurt or affected in some way by the actions of this particular group.
Friendship becomes a cloak for the diminishment of human community. Jesus is not encouraging mafia-like conspirators only concerned for their own well being – although sometimes you might wonder about the church and look around the world at how the church operates, particularly with regard to child sex abuse.
We need to recall the whole context here. In the very next verse after our passage, the obverse of love is referred to as being a reality for these group of Christ’s followers:
“If the world hates you; be aware that it hated me before it hated you.” (15:18)
This was the context for these words. These Christians, these followers of Jesus, would be despised and hated by all sorts of political, religious and social powers – and so it was essential that within their number, they lived out and showed the essential love of God to each other. They were called to be a sign of hope for such a broken world.
There was also another reason I think for Jesus extolling love of other friends of Jesus. With a friend like Jesus, you might be tempted to forget about other people and their needs. ‘I’m all right; I’m sweet with God, I can forget about others.’ This was the attitude of the prevailing Greek and Roman religious culture of the time. Religion was about correct worship practices. You would therefore need a priest, oracle or soothsayer to help you get your worship right, so that this god or that god would help you.
It may even been the prevailing state of the Jewish religion at the time. Get ritual purity right, and you would not need to do anything else. In other words, there was no personal ethical responsibility to really think of others. Why would you need to? That would be your favourite deities’ responsibility; or, if you felt assured of your own righteousness before Yahweh, why did you need to think of others?
So to be a friend with Jesus could have little impact on how one lived one’s daily life. It was all about just me and God. . . and forget about others. Jesus is, however, saying something very challenging. God’s love really does mean something for us in our daily lives – and we need to show that with others. Certainly the epistle of John makes that point abundantly clear.
The commandment we have from Jesus is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. (1 John 4:21)
In fact, it is not inward looking. With love for one another, we will conqueror the world.
And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. (1 John 5:4)
A community of mutual love will conqueror the world. As the epistle again says, “This is the victory that conquerors the world, our faith” (1 John 5:3). This is certainly not inward looking, and places the church apart from the world – loving one’s brothers and sisters, who may be very different from you, within the church is the place to start in the spread of the gospel.
Last week I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity I had to attend the Presbytery Ministry Conference. It was a good time to be challenged, reflect and rest. Two phrases that particularly struck me from this time:
The church’s call is to create analogies for the kingdom of God.
A second was to be reminded of the words of Martin Luther King that “the arc of history is towards justice”. And so, perhaps combining these two, we might have – the arc of salvation, or the friendship with God, is towards inclusion (as opposed to exclusion because we need to be pure and righteous); inclusion of the outcast, the marginalised, the forgotten, those who in their sexuality are different, who are ill within first the church, and then within our wider world.
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
