Friendship with Christ: Reflections on the last discourse in St John. (15. 12-17)
- Jun 1, 2014
- 4 min read
Jesus said to his disciples: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love 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 no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. This I command you: love one another.”
Any of us who has ever experienced a parting from those we love, whether as temporary but still painful physical absence – parting is such sweet sorrow, but it is sorrow nonetheless; the anguish of estrangement, misunderstanding or betrayal, where the continued physical presence of the beloved feels like a wound and a mockery, or death itself, coldly shocking even when prepared for, any of us – which I’m guessing is all of us - will know, I suspect, a curious phenomenon. In all such circumstances, the last conversations we shared with the friends who are lost to us, or whom we fear lost to us, tend to take on a heightened significance. We hoard up our words and theirs, and drag them out for frequent inspection, sometimes almost obsessively, investing them with a profundity and a precision that we would never think of bestowing on our, or their more everyday utterances. And, frankly, at least at its most extreme, in this practice, madness sometimes lies. “And then I said…and then he said, and then I said”: we can drive ourselves to distraction this way, tearing great gashes out of our peace of mind as we examine the minutiae of our motives, and those of our friends in an attempt, fundamentally, to assure ourselves of our worth in the eyes of our friends, and therefore in our own. And of course, no human words, ultimately, can bear that kind of weight.
Tonight’s gospel, like all those we have been listening to on weekdays recently, allows us to eavesdrop on the parting of friends, on what took place between the Lord and his disciples at the Last Supper. But this conversation is different from our farewell discourses and our frantic evaluations of them: in the first place because the words we hear tonight are the words of the Word of God himself, and secondly because as we listen to them in Eastertide, the meal on the night he was betrayed is suffused with the light of the Lord’s resurrection. These words, unlike our own, will bear constant scrutiny, infinite examination: we could spend the entirety of our life reflecting on what he said and what he meant, and it would bring us nothing but healing and peace, nothing but an ever deeper awareness of our dignity as those for whom the Lord laid down his life, as those who are reborn in him risen from the tomb.
At the heart of tonight’s gospel, we have that assurance of another’s acceptance that we long for so deeply, and from the most beautiful possible source: the Lord calls us his friends. And the more we reflect on the context on which he does so, the more astonishing, the more challenging and yet also the more consoling does this naming appear.
In the first place, listening to the words of Jesus we can have no illusion as to the demands of this friendship. Those he calls friends he commands to do as he does, to love as he does, and he makes it clear what this will involve. No one can have greater love than to lay down his life for his friends he says, preparing the disciples for what will happen to him the next day. Preparing the disciples, and preparing us as we listen in, for what will happen to us. We may be unlikely to be called on literally to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters, though as we all know, in many parts of our world Christians are facing martyrdom with courage today. But it is certain that to be a friend of Jesus is to stare crucifixion in the face – to be prepared to be torn apart by our very desire to embrace the whole world in love, and still more, by the rejection of that love which we must often face as He did. The call to complete self-giving that Jesus issues here would, of course be impossible for us to fulfil in our own strength, or rather, in our own weakness, which is why he is so insistent: you did not choose me: no, I chose you. We are chosen to love as Jesus loves, and we can be quite sure that he will give us what we need to fulfil his command. Nothing could give us greater dignity, and, if it leads to crucifixion with him, it will also lead, ultimately to our rising from the dead with him.
Notice too that in calling us friends, even whilst giving us his new commandment, Jesus draws a careful distinction between the obedience of friendship and the obedience of servitude. He does command us but we are not to do as we are told in a spirit of blind obedience as mere functionaries, cogs in a wheel, the servants who do not know their master’s business. Our obedience, our keeping of his commands is born of the tendency of the lover to come to resemble the beloved: if you love me, you will keep my commandments, Jesus will tell them a little later, you will, as he puts it here, “love one another as I have loved you”. Keeping Jesus’ new commandment, it turns out, is the assurance of our true worth as nothing else can be, because it means becoming what we are meant to be, the image of God made new in his risen Son.
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