Just Friends
John 15:9-17

May 21, 2006


It is surprising where you find friends. Gregory Jones and Kevin Armstrong have written Resurrecting Excellence about reviving the ministry of both churches and pastors, and along the way the adventures of some local churches are recounted. A tale of a confirmation class gone right gets us on the right road.

Southport Church had a new associate pastor who was handed the job of conducting the confirmation class. No shortage of candidates, but a Sunday afternoon two hour lecture had such a reputation for being boring that even the parents were embarrassed to send their children to it. The associate minister had a different idea that promised better things, though not without risk. There is no risk in being bored.

The idea was to assign an older member of the congregation to be in a mentoring relationship with a particular young person. They would go to worship together, meet at least once a week and do any number of things, perhaps even talk religion! It took a while to match up the appropriate pairs, but every adult asked agreed to sign on.

The kickoff was a retreat at a camp out of town. Not too many boarded the bus with much enthusiasm, yet after the weekend there was a different atmosphere, except that when the bus was loaded to go home, three boys had gone for a walk delaying leaving for 90 minutes. One of those boys was Andy and Bob was his mentor.

Bob was 70 and he and his wife picked up Andy for dinner once a week and sat together during worship. “We didn’t really learn much about Scripture tonight,” Bob reported to Andy’s parents, but they could tell there was a growing affection between the two. They introduced each other as “my friend.”

The long and short of it was that this mentor idea really worked well. A few exceptions, of course: some adults could never find the time to get together and a couple of teenagers constantly challenged their mentor. Years later many of the pairs maintained friendship and knowledge of how each were doing. The situation for Bob and Andy became more complicated and simple.

A couple years after confirmation the news came that Andy had a rare form of cancer. A few months after learning this, Bob found out that he had cancer as well. The two remained friends even more so, visiting and encouraging one another on the ultimate journey. Bob went first and nine months later so did Andy. They were not mentor and confirmand, teacher and disciple, grandfather and teenager - just friends, sharing each other’s lives and deaths to the last minute.

The problem some people have with Jesus’ talk about love is that he seems to have made it a commandment. We generally resist commandments here. It’s not that we are defiant of authority, but it seems to us that if you absolutely require someone to do something, command her to act in a certain way, it is a matter of power, not of genuine conviction. I know that a lot of times I just have to do something whether I like it or not, but I yearn to act by conviction and commitment, not by rote or by order. I love because I want to love.

Ironically, Jesus never was very big on commandments. He preferred beatitudes - blessed are you when you act in this way. Still, the word commandment is there, although he reduced his plural commandments down to a single one. “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” It sounds like so many playground taunts, a spiritual blackmail. Take this out of its context and probably you will misunderstand Jesus and certainly will misunderstand love.

This is not a command of power, but an invitation to a direction. Jesus is inviting us into a covenant, a continuing way of directing and orienting our lives. If you don’t/won’t/can’t love one another, the friendship of Jesus doesn’t materialize and doesn’t matter at all to you, for it simply does not make any sense.

No longer do I call you servants, Jesus goes on, the word could as easily be translated slaves. There are a trillion of these relationships - a hierarchical gap of elitism that separates you and me from most other human beings - usually governed by the will to power, and almost always impersonal in that it does not matter what the other person thinks. Jesus describes what he means: a servant doesn’t know what his master is doing or thinking. A friend knows what you are thinking before you think it.

What does it mean that the Creator of the Universe - whose ontological (condition of being and existence) gap between God and creation is beyond our imagination - is willing to let us in on what God is doing and thinking? It means, how can you be anything less than a friend to your fellow human being with whom there is no gap between you and her?

If you can keep this one straightforward commandment repeated twice - to love one another - everything else follows. It is virtually impossible to love your boss or your master or your commander. When you come to know him as a human being, when you know what he is thinking and suffering, then he becomes your friend. This is not “just friends” - this is the highest state of relationship, a relationship that comes close at times to the divine.

Bob and Andy recognized across the generation gap that they were friends in a way that insisted upon reinterpreting the word. This was not a casual and easy acquaintance, but a gathering of two souls that had little in common at first, and then gradually had all the important things in common. Bob and Andy knew what each other was doing and kept track of one another. They knew what each other was thinking - by actually listening to one another and by, say it, divine intuition. In time they came to know how each other was dying and that showed each of them - and many others - how to live that next minute, and how to be friends for life.

That idea of commanding us to love another still nudges us the wrong way. Just to be the gadfly, take note that you cannot take the initiative and choose Jesus as your friend - he has already chosen you. Moreover, Jesus has appointed you to go and bear fruit. That is, there already is a conscious and intentional decision to direct you somewhere. You have a specific job and a specific purpose. First, it is to love one another; second, to become friends with all sorts of other people; and finally, well not finally, but continually, to go where that love sends you.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan