“I have called you friends.” (John 15:15)
It’s a strange thing for God to address human beings as friends; we tend to think of him in glorious isolation up there in heaven. Yet in this passage above from the Gospel of John, Jesus of Nazareth, truly God and truly human, confides in his followers and trusts them with his friendship. Not only his teaching or his authority or his example, but his friendship. Throughout his life, Jesus does many things to startle those closest to him (healing people, exorcising demons, rebuking the most powerful members of society), but here he speaks of mutual love and friendship. And because Jesus engages in human friendship, he lends it a certain dignity. This frail human thing, he has elevated. The friend, as one ancient philosopher put it, is another self. And a great deal of self-restraint and perseverance is needed to love another person as one’s self. This is why it’s so hard for people who have bad habits to be good and true friends. And even though everyone uses the word ‘friend,’ how many people do we know whom we love as other selves?
Yet for all its importance, this bond of friendship is something totally voluntary: we can’t force anyone to be friends with us. For all of its fragile voluntariness, friendship turns out to be quite needed for the survival and health of society. We see evidence of this need every time we go on Twitter. Lastly, human friendship is the apprenticeship for divine friendship. To paraphrase the Bible: “if you can’t love your friend whom you do see, how can you love your Friend whom you cannot see” (1 John 4:20). Fall is a great opportunity for making and renewing friendships, both human ones and the one with God. Time spent on them, and time spent on Him, is never time wasted.
