Friendship

by John V. Upton, Executive Director

Growing means changing.  And it seems to me that one of those dramatic changes that occurs as we grow older is our sense of friendship.  When we were children, our friends were most of all our playmates.  You could have a rather large, loose circle of friends – the ones you invited to your birthday party, the ones you joined for a sleepover.  But it’s mostly about who you liked to play with and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with.

In adolescence, friendships intensify.  When you’re a teenager, friends are the ones you change with.  Family, school, your world, your body, your role – it’s all a blur of change.  Among your peers, cliques, groups, and subgroups, you decide what group fits you.  Your friends are the ones you ride it out with; they’re the ones who understand.

A new dimension of friendship arrives in young adulthood.  For me it was in graduate school and just after.  We were coming into our own; we were young, exuberantly alive, and we would change the world.  We had exhilarating friendships of shared ideas, commitments, and passions.

So childhood friends are playmates; teenage friends understand; young adult friends share a fire of commitments.  But there is another kind of friendship that comes in life, often in middle age, though it may come sooner or it may come later, at the time when life falls apart.  You lose yourself in some terrible failure or in some other utter grief; or a deep sense of threat undoes you; or in the crush of pressures, disappointments, and dreary, dreary sameness, you realize one day that long ago you lost your way, and what now?

In such a season, a season of great pain, what is a friend?  I think it’s the one who stays.  Such a friend may not have many words for you, may not even fully understand you – really, how could a friend understand what you don’t understand yourself?  Still, a friend stays – listening, asking, waiting, loving, sometimes in silence.  Some folks can’t do it.  Some can’t function as friend if they don’t feel they understand, or if they don’t have words to make it all better, or if your pain just isn’t easy to be with.  But there are some who know that the secret is simply staying; they know the value of the steady pursuit of just being present.  These are masters of friendship.  The older we grow and the more pain we face, the finer and richer thing it is to have a good friend.  With age and experience, our stock in friendship rises.

When we were little children, they fed us on the word “friend,” knowing we could appreciate the taste of it; but only time can teach how richly sustaining through all weathers a real friendship can be.  We learn this in the steady presence of our best friends; and sometimes, sadly, we learn as we grieve their absence.

On this subject Jesus speaks with poignant, disarming simplicity:  “You are my friends.”  Those who followed him he called his friends.  It amazes me how many people are uncomfortable regarding Jesus as a friend.  Some think it is childish to speak of Jesus as friend.  We wouldn’t want to reduce Jesus to a chum, a buddy who shares our bias, a pal with no high demands to make of us.  No, “let’s show more respect,” they warn.  So they say, “let’s call Jesus prophet, teacher, example.”  Others say, “we’ll just call him Lord, Christ, Redeemer, King.”  But Friend?

It’s interesting that the first people to use that word of him were his enemies.  They didn’t like the company he kept and the way he was present to certain people, so they sneered at him and tagged him, “Friend – of sinners!”  They meant it for a slur, and he wore it like a crown.  They meant he was playing “buddy” to lowlifes and losers.  Jesus knew what friendship he truly brought to those people, and it’s likely that the so-called lowlifes and losers had at least a certain awed sense of the kind of friend to them he was.  As a sinner myself, I live in an awed sense of the kind of friend he is to me.

I know no single term fully captures who Jesus was and is; that’s why scripture sings so many names for him.  But of all the titles we may grant him, if a sense of him as friend is absent, we haven’t named him well enough. Christ is a startling intimacy, a pursuing kindness, God’s commitment to “being-with” – not needing words from us or explanation, but already understanding and staying, staying supremely present in all pain as in all joy.

It may surprise you, then, to hear that on the occasion he called us his friends, he hinged it on a big “if”: “You are my friends if you do what I command you.”  I don’t know about you, but it makes me want to say, “Now hold on here!”  What kind of friend is this, who says “if”?  Well, have a closer look.  The “if”is not the condition for Jesus being a friend to us; the “if” is a condition for us to be friends to him.  He has perfectly befriended us.  “Want to befriend me?” he asks.  “Do what I command you.”  And if you want to know what he means, he spells that out:  “This is my commandment, that you love each other as I have loved you.”  And so it comes down to this: for us to be friends to Jesus, we must befriend each other.  We follow him into friendships just like the friendships he made.

And what this means is radically open friendships, and it likely means moving beyond our comfort zone.  The vocation of Christ-like friendships will have us going to people outside our little circle of like-minded buddies.  It means we start drawing bigger circles of “being-with.”  And it means that we specialize in being the kind of friends who stay, especially with people who are in unpleasant places.

Many in the world think they need a friend more than they need God.  To meet them in Christ-like friendship will give them both.  You and I have had a taste of what that is like.  For when we answered the knock at our door and saw Christ come to join us, we found ourselves encountered by God Almighty, and by the steady good presence of a Friend.