In
his final words to his disciples, Jesus sets up a sneaky and rather sickening
syllogism. Major premise: You are My friends. How
wonderful! But then the Lord lands the sucker-punch. Minor premise: You did not choose Me but I chose you
implies the uncomfortable downside that nor did we choose each other. Conclusion:
This I command you, that you love one
another. Apparently, friendship with Christ
includes a call to friendship with other Christians - all of them. An old proverb has it that you can
choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives. Christians, however,
can’t even choose their friends.
As
Charles Ryder, the fictional narrator of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, heads off for his first year at Oxford, his
cousin Jasper gives him some sage advice: “You’ll find you spend half your
second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first.” This
snake-skin shedding of outgrown pals is so common that the psychologists have
given it a name: socioemotional
selectivity theory. Like the chambered nautilus, we wall off outgrown
acquaintances, sentencing them to solitary confinement in the sealed-off cells
of our inattention.
You
are My friends. . . .You did not choose Me but I chose you. . . . This I
command you, that you love one another.
Along with clarifying the external
boundaries of friendship, Jesus defines the internal qualities: availability
and vulnerability, both of which he demonstrates.
Greater
love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. Calvary says that my life belongs to
Christ who meets me in my friend. Laying down my whole life includes the
trickier proposition of laying out my daily life in discrete parcels of seconds
and dollars and deeds and words.
I
have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have
made known to you. We
shut out slaves from our vulnerable selves because you never know when the help
might go blabbing to some tell-all biographer. Jesus didn’t dazzle the disciples
with solutions to theological mysteries; he let them see his sweat-soaked
humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane. Christian friendship demands the kind of
honest living that shatters my marble façade and tells my sisters and brothers
who I really am.
You can choose your friends, but you
can’t choose your relatives. Christians, however, can’t even choose their
friends. To paraphrase Proverbs 18.24, When Facebook friendships are only a
click away, un-friending is just as easy, but Christ calls us to a friendship
that runs deeper than family.
Friends
Don’t Let Friends Go Friendless,
Doug
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