From Followers to Friends

‘I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father’.

Friendship is a universal human need in all ages and in all societies.  It is one of those rare human desires that is unequivocally good for us.  Study after study in the US and UK has found that meaningful social connections can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, obesity and depression.  Last year a report by the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy highlighted what he called an ‘epidemic of loneliness’ in the West, declaring it a major public health concern that has the equivalent negative impact of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.  But thankfully the cure for this epidemic is already known: ‘Our individual relationships are an untapped resource’, Murthy wrote, ‘a source of healing hiding in plain sight’.  His prescription was refreshingly simple, cheap and effective: ‘Make time to share a meal.  Listen without the distraction of your phone.  Perform an act of service …The keys to human connection are simple, but extraordinarily powerful’.

This passage from John provides a window onto the remarkable connections of love and friendship that bind Father, Son and disciples. This is a love-triangle of sorts, but not the kind that gets written about in novels or is engineered by reality TV.  There is no tension and competition here, but rather reciprocity, balance, and mutuality.  Father, Son, and disciples: three points of a triangle held together by the power of the Holy Spirit poured out at Pentecost who, as the passage from Acts records, performed the astonishing feat of including Gentiles visibly within the covenant love of God’s promise to Israel, and bringing friendship with God into the grasp of all humanity.

The section of John’s gospel between chapters 13 and 17 is all about the disciples.  It is an interlude of teaching and thinking about Jesus’s friends that is framed by key events of Passiontide: the triumphal entry into Jerusalem in chapter 12 and Jesus’s arrest in chapter 18.  It is compositionally very striking that between the poles of those two dramatic events in the narrative of salvation -- one characterised by rejoicing, the other by betrayal -- are these five chapters devoted to Jesus’s close circle of followers and their successors, the community of Christian believers.  Embedded like this in John’s narrative of the Passion, these chapters constitute a worked example of the transformations effected by God’s grace poured out in salvation: in reading them we witness the transformation of followers into friends.  In this human, sociable interlude between his entry into Jerusalem and arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus therefore amplifies his teaching about himself as God’s Son by describing his relationship with the disciples, bringing them into that triangle of mutuality, and preparing them for the time when he is with them no longer. He washes their feet; predicts that Judas will betray him and Peter disown him but his love for them will not falter; tells them of rooms in his Father’s house to be prepared for them; promises the Holy Spirit and gives them abiding commands for the future – ‘Love one another’ (13:34). ‘Trust in God; trust also in me’ (14:1).

The context for this passage’s teaching on friendship with Christ is provided by the parable of the vine and branches that precedes it and that places it within a Biblical perspective.  ‘I am the true vine’, Jesus has just declared, ‘and my Father is the gardener’.  The garden of course is the symbolic space of human-divine interaction throughout the Bible: the Lord God walks in the garden in the cool of the day in Genesis, and shortly after this passage Jesus will be arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, where he chooses to spend his final hours with his disciples.  Gardens are where God walks and talks with his friends.

The vine metaphor that leads into this teaching on love and friendship would have been very familiar to the disciples.  Viticulture was an integral part of life in 1st century Palestine, and wine and winemaking are mentioned throughout the Bible.  The vineyard is an emblem of prosperity and peace, and the vine a sign of God’s relationship with his people Israel: ‘I had planted you like a choice vine of sound and reliable stock’ he declares through the prophet Jeremiah (2:21).  As a metaphor, it emphasises the reciprocal relationship of dependence and nurture: the branches of a vine cannot bear fruit without the ministrations of the vinedresser, hence a fruitful vine represents obedience and union.  It is the pattern and prophecy of the new covenant of belonging and friendship that is being worked out as Jesus is speaking to the disciples.

The bedrock of this new covenant is the Father’s love for his Son - a divine love, in Greek agape: a love that is in the nature of God, not a feeling as we understand human love, but an identity, a purpose, rooted in divine action: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son’ (John 3:16).

Agape is not what the disciples can or should do, as it belongs to the divine.  Their role is to ‘abide’, to remain in Christ’s love for them and to love one another with the love of the friend, or philos, as Christ has loved them.  This is the core of the matter: ‘friend’, philos, references a deep, intimate and trusting relationship.  It is the kind of relationship that in the ancient world involved the breaking of bread together – and of course at the heart of these chapters on followers as friends there lies the Last Supper.  It is not referenced directly by John in his gospel, but this is the friendship-event that gives form and meaning to all of these teachings on discipleship.

What does it mean for the disciples to be thus designated as friends of Christ?  There are famous examples of friends in the Bible: David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, Job and his comforters. Biblical and ancient friendship was a loving, loyal, mutual, voluntary and unselfish bond, like today.  Although some family members, such as Ruth and Naomi, might be designated as friends, in general friendship was distinctive because it sat outside the dominant bonds of family and tribe.  Culturally, the character of friendship as ‘voluntary’ is very important: unlike other ancient social relationships, friendship is not derived from family or race. In anthropological terms, it is an achieved not an ascribed relationship.  In this, it is utterly different from bonds that depend on birth or social hierarchies.

Reciprocity and mutuality are key to friendship.  It is not possible to be a friend in the company of one.  In all pre-modern societies, this reciprocity had an inescapable air of instrumentality: a friend provides help, gives good advice, always acts in one’s best interests, is there in time of need.  The ‘noble fruits of friendship’, as described by the seventeenth-century essayist Francis Bacon, are disinterested affection, good counsel and that compassionate support described by Bacon in the wonderful phrase ‘aid and bearing a part, in all actions and occasions’.

Crucially, though, in the ancient world, friendship is precluded from the master-slave relationship, which is reflected in Jesus’s distinction here between servants and friends. Knowledge is at the root of this difference – the servant does not know what the master is doing.  By contrast, as Jesus is at pains to point out, the knowledge of the Father flows through him to his friends the disciples … and onwards, outwards, to the house of Cornelius in Caesarea where Peter is speaking in the passage from Acts and the Holy Spirit is poured out upon the Gentiles, breaking the boundaries of convention, bestowing knowledge of God upon them, and enabling them to worship the LORD.  And as recounted in the rest of the Book of Acts, this knowledge of the Father through friendship with the Son flows on from there, across the Eastern Mediterranean and on to Rome, bringing everything Jesus heard from his Father even to the heart of the Empire and beyond.

As the philosopher Michel de Montaigne observed, ‘Friendship feeds on communication’, and one characteristic of agape is that God loves to talk with the world he loves.  Talking with God is the pattern and exemplar of Biblical friendship: ‘The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend’ (Ex 33:11).  Like Moses, Abraham is repeatedly characterised as God’s friend.  When Jesus calls the disciples his friends, therefore, he is both harking back to the idea of friendship as eminence, intimacy with the divine, and also moving the dial on that very convention.  The men and women whom Jesus sought as his friends were not princes, warriors, or leaders.  They were fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes and he did with them what friends do: he broke bread with them, celebrated weddings with them, wept with them.

The Surgeon General in the report I quoted called friendship ‘a source of healing hiding in plain sight’.  If that is true of mere human friendship, how much more true is it for the offer of friendship held out to us by Christ, as it was to the disciples and the crowds gathered at Cornelius’ house. The Bidding Prayer with which I began pays tribute to the bonds of loyalty and friendship that structure and sustain the communities of our University and colleges; these are the bonds that underpin our relationship to those benefactors whose names I read.  We have not met them, yet in Bacon’s terms they have offered us ‘the noble fruits of friendship’ nonetheless.  But in its crescendo the Bidding Prayer points to a love greater than these, the greatest love as indicated to his disciples by Jesus – that of laying down one’s life for one’s friends, the very thing Jesus was about to do when he spoke these words.  Let us praise God together then, as the prayer declares, ‘for his inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory’. Or, as expressed in the final verse of Samuel Crossman’s seventeenth-century hymn ‘My Song is Love Unknown’:

Here might I stay and sing:
  no story so divine;
never was love, dear King,
  never was grief like Thine!
    This is my Friend,
      in Whose sweet praise
      I all my days
    could gladly spend.

Amen