You are my friends
Easter 6, 21 May, 2006
Robert Whalley, Chaplain, RMIT and La Trobe Universities
John 15:9-17
The 20th century poet Robert Frost once wrote something to the effect
that you should take the light things seriously and the serious
things lightly. That line kept coming to mind this week as I was
living with the Gospel for today which is John the evangelist at his
most seriously sublime with words that, at least for me, point to the
very centre of the good news of the saving love of God in the face of
Jesus Christ. Listen:
"As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love...
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."
So how do we, can we, respond to these amazing words? How do we
receive this message? How can we listen and live out our lives in
light of the – almost beyond belief – possibility that this is all
true, that the Good News is this good? That God is with us as a human
being giving his life over as a gift, in order to share the road as a
friend. God is my friend! I've heard that line before – we all have
– but still, God wants to be, is willing to be, is here to be, my
friend. That's the line that stayed with me all week: a friend.
It is a surprising turn in this book of the New Testament. On the
whole, the Gospel of John has a very high Christology. When he looks
at Jesus, He sees a holy priest, a man with great authority who
always is at the centre of the scene. That's his take on it. You
would never get a Jesus who is amazed at the disbelief of the crowds,
as you do in Mark, you would never get a Gethsemane scene where he
asks that cup might not come to him, there's no sweating blood here.
The Jesus that John describes lays down his life with serenity and
ease. He proceeds through the actions, signs, miracles, teachings
with the majesty of a master with his students, not unlike a Greek
sage of the same time. He almost seems slightly above it all.
Except for this line: You are my friends. And that brings another
level of discourse, another vantage point to the picture, a different
focus, a spaciousness of understanding, of relationship and intimacy
that would not be possible if it were not on the horizontal ground of
being friends. Seeing God close-up is one thing, Moses sees that and
takes off his shoes and trembles, but when God comes close to offer
friendship it is another matter, it requires another posture, another
response. In this case, this morning, it requires a bit of a detour,
so bear with me.
Let me tell you about my friend Greg Eaves. I met Greg in the autumn
of 1976. I was taking a seminar on the sociologist Peter Berger, and
knew most of the people in the classroom that first day except for
this English guy who showed up late and was funny and smart and a
little shy. So, we talked a few times and went out for a coffee and a
beer after that and the years went by. Now he lives in England and we
talk every couple of months and whenever I get there I stay with him
and his partner, Julia, and I am hoping that next year they'll get
here for a stay,
But there was one day, maybe six months or a year after we first met,
when he was telling me something, and it might have been boring, or
something I wasn't that interested in – because Greg has a way of
going on sometimes, or maybe I was just in a different mood, I don't
know. But when I looked at him at that moment, nattering away about
something, I realized that we were friends, not just folk who did
stuff together sometimes, but friends. And I knew it was likely that
it would be forever, and that who he was and what he did, was, would
be, had to be, important to me, was tied up with who I was and what I
wanted and this friendship was going to be something that mattered
and lasted. And it hit me, in a way I find difficult to understand
and not easy to articulate, that this friendship was and would be one
of the most important things in my life. And so it has been.
Through good times and bad, job setbacks and personal problems,
depressed times, the deaths of parents, health issues, and breakup
of relationships, and work woes, and all the struggles and pains and
glories of being human together. We still get together, after all
these years, and we look at each other. Two old guys somewhat
battered about by time and toil, and somewhat surprised by the love,
joy, life, in the middle of it. Greg plays the guitar and often we
start singing old songs from the 60s or 70s, with great noise and
rather badly I'll admit, which Julia thinks is funny, if a bit
trying, but she suffers it, as friends do. And it is one of the
dearest parts of my life. For friendship is a very common and
wonderful thing.
And Jesus, in the Gospel of John for today, calls us friends. That's
the amazing turn; in the middle of this epic prose poem, while the
hero moves on towards his freely chosen sacrificial death, he gathers
up this rag-tag group: folk who have been following along, getting
whatever knowledge, techniques, reassurance, hope, they could gather
from what he said and what they saw, and he turns to them and says,
"you are my friends." It is such a surprise, coming in John's great
and glorious Gospel, that this son of God, this sign of love, ôhow
deep. How broad, how highö, should choose to pitch his tent with us
in the middle of this muddy journey, as a friend on the way. The
joyous scandal of John's Gospel is that God's very flesh comes that
close, gets familiar with us, calls us to be friends.
Irenaeus, an early Bishop of the church, once said that the glory of
God is a human being fully alive. We have seen the face of the
liveliest human in this Jesus, this Jesus our friend. And there is
our hope, that beyond belief and disbelief, beyond doctrine and
commandment. Beyond all the plans and politics of the church and the
world, there is a relationship of acceptance and presence, of love
and delight. God is with us as a friend, with each of us, with all of
us! All of us, for friends take on the whole package: our whole
selves, our souls and bodies, our doubts and loves, our triumphs and
tragedies. With our greatest plans and our deepest fears and
failures, the moments of majesties, the times of betrayal – both done
to us and by us, bigger than all that. Closer than all that; as we go
through all the sad tones and the great music that comes with being
human, we find we don't have to sing it out alone.
For now all this journeying, each of our stories and each of our
separate lives are set in this new context, in the company of God,
Jesus, as a friend. Wherever we are, whatever we're doing, God is
willing to come towards us, arms outstretched in friendship to join
us, like the father of the prodigal, like love walking in with a
human face. In the very middle of the way, every moment, every day,
in the very midst of all the painfully outstretched contradictions
that come in the business of being human.
Jesus our friend is willing and able to meet us in the very middle of
everything, with all the fears of a tentative life and an empty
death. He is willing to share the road to the centre of tragedy, to
the wondering why, to the time and the site that makes no sense, to
the very foot of the cross and further: willing to meet us
everywhere, even there, and to be with us close through the middle of
it all as a friend will. What if the world is truly that wrought,
that complex, that intimate, and we matter that much, to God?
We are here to take that chance, to move into that relationship, to
live into that lively truth, that God wills to be intimate with us.
What amazing good news it might be! And Jesus said, 'You are my
friends".
The Lord be with you.
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