Best friends are a true gift from God.
They bring out the best in us.
They can make us our best selves if you would.
Think for a moment of your current best friend;
maybe you have known him or her all your life; since you were a kids;
or maybe someone relatively new.
Think for a moment of how they have changed your life;
made your life so much more full because of them.
Best friends can bring out the silly inside of us; the humor.
They can make a heavy day light
and a sad day more tolerable.
Best friends have the ability to draw out of us
sincerity, our humanity and our noble, best selves.
Fundamentally, best friends can prove
our capacity for love;
our innate propensity give to love.
They prove our capacity to love beyond ourselves;
our capacity to go beyond our blood lines
and to love somebody completely other than ourselves.
Often, people who are not even in our same ethnic race;
people who are not even our same gender;
people who are not a part of our same nation;
we can find in them a completion of who we are.
In so many ways, we find and is proven to us
a capacity for friendship and love that goes beyond all others.
It is often defined as solidarity.
I like to think of it as basically true and beautiful friendship.
Today, we celebrate the Passion of Christ
and we celebrate the clarity when Christ
became the best friend to all humanity.
Of course we know what defines a person is friendship
beyond all others is to lay down one’s life for one’s friend.
Christ does that for every single one of us.
Christ goes across every nation and every color and every creed.
He died for all of us to make all of us his best friend.
And for us, to know that he is, well, our best friend.
You see he dies for every African.
Every Asian.
Every European.
Every American.
Without distinction.
He is the one who binds us together as our best friend.
Now if we can enter into that mindset of
Christ as our best friend
then today’s gospel becomes very difficult to listen to
because as we listen to that scripture passage
we see how our best friend suffered for us;
how our best friend died for us;
and he never gave back in kind what he was given
but gave instead love and blessing instead of curse and sin.
Today in the Passion of Christ,
it is hard for us to hear the message of the Passion
that Christ died for us because he loved us so much.
But today is not the end of the story
because we have a whole week of this to celebrate;
and next Sunday will be the completion of the story the Resurrection.
But we must sit with this difficult reality of his Passion;
of his suffering; of his willingness to suffer for us his friends.
If you think of your best friend now and
think of how much you would be willing to suffer for them
and you think of how maybe they have suffered for you;
they have put out for you.
Maybe that friend is of a different nation and culture;
maybe this best friend is your spouse and
you know how much you love them;
and you know how much you would suffer for them and with them.
Today, may we reflect on Jesus Christ,
who is our best friend for all eternity.
And may we reflect deeply upon what he has done for us;
that he has laid down his life
so that we could know that we will have life eternal;
that he laid down is life so that we could know
of God’s profound love for us;
and that we would then share that love with others;
and to love others in the same self-sacrificing,
deep, profound friendship for others.
Today, as we remember Christ our best friend
and I hope that you will pray that he would
become even more your best friend.
Look around at your best friend today
and open your heart to the gift of your love for him or her
and them for you.
Know that is the seed of Christ’s love for you.
And maybe, maybe open your heart to be the best friend
for somebody new this year;
that by being open, humble, loving and kind
that you will bring the profound message of Christ
as best friend to us all to somebody new this year.
Today, we honor our best friend Jesus Christ.
