On Being Jesus' Friend

On Being Jesus' Friend--April 23, 2018

[Jesus said to his disciples:] "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father." [John 15:12-15]

It is a precious gift in this life--and one worth never taking for granted, mind you--to be let into someone else's life. 

Once we have grown out of trading baseball cards or homemade braided friendship bracelets with our friends in this life, really all we have to share with those who matter to us are our lives--the things going on in our days, the wishful thinking and half-baked dreams, the fears that keep us up in the night, and the sorrows that weigh on our hearts.  All we really have to share, once we are past the transactional stage of childhood, is ourselves.  And that is a precious, precious thing.

How much more precious, then--how wonderfully gracious--is it to hear that Jesus offers this very gift to his followers... to us included!  

I think that often, this whole conversation between Jesus and his disciples gets rushed through or swept over when we rehearse the storied drama of Holy Week.  These words from John 15 come on the night Jesus is betrayed--they fall between the moments when Jesus washes his disciples' feet (Judas included) and the betrayal in the garden.  And honestly, we tend to rush through that night even in our rehearsed liturgical reenactments.  But think about it--there on the night of his betrayal, with surely a million other things going through Jesus' mind and swirling around outside, with Jesus' heart about to break from loneliness and the specter of looming disappointment when all his closest followers will abandon him in the dark, in the midst of all that, Jesus invites this students of his to know that they are his... friends.

And what makes for the critical difference now, as Jesus says it, is that he lets his disciples in to all that is going on for him--in his head, in his heart, in the plans in front of him.  "I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made know to you everything..." he says.  This is a beautiful, overwhelming moment.  He lets them in.  The life that Jesus gives us is not somewhere off at a distance, removed from him.  It is right in the thick of what Jesus himself is going through.  

Think for a moment about the celebrity you sent fan-mail to when you were a teenager, or the teacher or professor you respected the most in school.  You might well have told them how much you liked their movies, loved their books, listened to their music, or learned from their lessons... but you never really expect them to let you in on their own lives, not with any depth.  That's not the nature of that kind of relationship--the celebrity-fan relationship, or the teacher-student relationship is lopsided that way.  It flows basically in one direction.  And sometimes for the big crowds who followed around with Jesus, it may have felt the same way, there, too--Jesus would teach from a distance, and they would shout their "Hosanna" back from a distance, or beg to touch the fringe of his cloak.  But you just didn't expect friendship--something that flowed in both directions--with this man of God.  Rabbis take on students, not friends.  Messiahs command subordinates, not companions.  And yet, here is Jesus, letting go of all of that distance and just bringing his disciples in to share his own life with them.

That's what it is to be a friend, after all, and so that is what it is to name Jesus as your friend, too.  Jesus lets us in.  

My goodness, that sounds too good to be true even just to type the words!  And yet, that is exactly what happens here in this scene.  Jesus opens himself up to let his disciples--who are now named his "friends"--know what is going on for him, what he is troubled about yet in that night, what is waiting beyond it, and what more there is to come.  In the course of that upper room conversation, Jesus shares himself with the twelve, because ultimately that is all Jesus has to give.  He gives his life to them. 

Sometimes when we Christians talk about Jesus giving us "life," we hear that only in terms of quantity--we talk about "eternal life" in terms of "living forever after you die and go to heaven," as though Jesus were just doling out free recharging for our soul-batteries.  But here in these verses from John's Gospel, we get the important reminder that this isn't just about adding minutes or years or eons to our lifespan, or even our afterlife-span.  The amazing and holy thing is that Jesus opens up his own life to share it with ours.  We don't often think of Jesus being an actual person, with an actual personality, very often, do we?  We assume, perhaps that the Son of God is too holy to have a favorite food, or to have a sense of humor.  Maybe since we are assuming that Jesus is perfect, he must also be uniformly bland, too, a blank slate of a person with no distinguishing traits or thoughts, worries or loves or sorrows.  But that totally misses what it is to confess that Jesus is really one of us, doesn't it?  If the Gospels are clear about anything, it is that Jesus--for whatever other true things we may say about him--is one of us, a human life, capable of human relationships, and even, yes, of human friendships.  And what it is to call someone your friend in this life is to let them in--at least, so says Jesus himself.

Consider this, then, for the day ahead: the living Jesus, alive and risen from the dead, invites us to share his life with him.  That is, not simply that he will make people live forever after death, but that he lets us in, inviting us to know what he cares about, to share in his sorrows and joys, and to be "in" on the work he is up to, even here and now.  We are not simply a historical society, learning facts about a deceased figure whom we can never truly know.  And we are not simply a fan club, fawning at a distance over a celebrity too removed from ordinary life to be able to relate to us.  We have been called "friends" of this Jesus, and he shares, even now, his life with us.  

Today, look for ways that you and I can share Jesus' own life in the day that unfolds in front of us.  He has invited us to do so--he has, after all, called us his friends.

Lord Jesus, you who graciously call us not mere servants but friends, give us a sense of awe at the gift you have given us in inviting us to share your life with you, and let us make the most of sharing this day with you.