Sixth Sunday of Easter – Bill Harkins
John 15:9-17
15:9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
15:10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
15:11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
15:12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
15:13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
15:14 You are my friends if you do what I command you.
15:15 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.
15:16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.
15:17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
Good Morning, and welcome to Holy Family on this Sixth Sunday of Easter, and a day on which we consider what it may mean to call one another “Friend” as Jesus now refers to his disciples and, by extension, to each of us. In this passage from John’s Gospel, we hear again about the importance of abiding in love, and the core value of Christian fellowship as “friendship.” I believe Jesus is calling us to lives of integrity—and my favorite interpretation of this is “wholeness.” In responding elsewhere as he does to the Pharisees—and in referring as he does to the heart, thought to be the center of one’s capacity for courage and compassion—Jesus is asking us to consider the heart of our own faith and tradition, and the practices and disciplines that sustain it in “wholeness.” What activities, ritual and otherwise, help us be in “right relationship” with our neighbors, practicing hospitality, and grace, with a spirit of friendship? What allows us to maintain and deepen what theologian Paul Tillich referred to as “self-integration,” that process of finding our center of spiritual health and moral integrity? For Tillich this corresponded to a therapeutic model familiar to pastoral counselors…that one’s spiritual health is the wholeness of a person’s center, or “the ground of one’s being” as Tillich called it. What does it mean in this sense to call another one’s “friend”? What might be your examples of true friendship and, conversely, what might we learn when we miss the mark, and how might we seek forgiveness? I don’t know about you, but I can think of examples of both in my life.
In the synoptic gospels the concept of friend is not nearly as prominent as it is in the gospel of John. In Luke and Matthew, the concept is found in rather negative contexts. Luke refers to friends as handing over Christians in times of persecution (21:16). In Matthew, Jesus as friend is a source of criticism for his opponents. They accurately accuse him of being “a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (11:19). He is criticized for recognizing no boundaries in friendship, for disregarding ritual purity. (Ford, 108) I see myself in these less positive images too, and they call upon me to recognize times when I have not been the kind of friend I would prefer to be, but, I’ll say more about that in a minute.
The gospel of John is a different story. Here the word friend (philo) occurs six times. Jesus mentions the “friend of the bridegroom” in a positive context in 3:29. Jesus refers to Lazarus as “our Friend” (11:11). We are told that the good shepherd “lays down his life for his friends” (10:11). The disciples are elevated from servants to friends in John 15:13-15. The crowd taunts Pilate, calling him “no friend of the emperor”—if if he releases Jesus—in John 19. Then there is the verb to love: phileo. The Father loves the Son and shares his plans and purposes with him, which is what friends do (Jn. 5:20). Jesus loves his friend Lazarus (11:36). The one who loves his life will lose it (12:25).
In this week’s text, John 15:19-17, immediately following on the metaphor of the Vine and the branches, Jesus teaches the disciples that discipleship means friendship with him and with God. Discipleship is being a branch of the vine. It is ultimately relational. Hence Jesus’ use of the term “friends” for his followers: “I no longer call you servants . . . I have called you friends” (v. 14). Jesus distinguishes friendship from servanthood. To be a friend is to share a personal relationship and to be made aware of the plans and purposes of the other. And he states the core value of friendship in the community of followers: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn. 15:13). In this love, we are understood as who we are without mask or pretension. The sometimes superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away; one can be authentic. Where we are understood, we are at home. And understanding nourishes belonging, and hospitality, values we seek to embody here. I wonder how thinking of ourselves as friends, gathered together as the Body of Christ that is Holy Family, might inform our understanding of hospitality. What might it mean to be a “soul friend” or, “anam cara” as John O’Donohue called it? In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam cara. It originally referred to someone to whom one confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of one’s life. With a soul-friend, we could share our inner-most self, our mind and our heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. This art of belonging awakened and fostered a deep and special companionship. I would add here that one can be a soul friend to canine and other animal companions. They have certainly been among my best friends. And I wonder how we might be better friends to the natural world that, after all, nurtures and sustains the very lives we live. Say what you will about those who hug trees—and I have been among them—but trees literally eat sunlight, and in so doing produce oxygen that gives us life. Anam cara indeed.
Of course, there are precedents for this sacrificial notion of friendship. If we do a historical rewind, we encounter the notion of friendship in the Old Testament, in Jewish writings between the Testaments and in Greek and Roman philosophy. For these contexts, competition and rivalry have no place in friendship. Trust is essential. Falsehood is not to be born. Much of this Pythagorean thought was adopted by the Stoics and by the early Christian communities as well. Socrates viewed friendship as the most precious of all possessions, the greatest blessing that a person can possess. A friend shows generosity and courage in caring for her or his friend. Being an anam cara requires of a purposeful presence — it asks that we show up with absolute integrity of intention and often, without the need to “fix” or change the other. It means giving ourselves away in love and friendship. I am so grateful to call my wife Vicky my best friend, and my sons and daughters-in-law have become adult friends as well. They continue to teach me. I hope to live long enough to be friends with my grandchildren. And I’ve recently returned from Nashville where with three friends from graduate school where we working on a book about the friendships born there some 40 years ago. I continue to learn from all of these anam cara friendships. I also continue to learn from times when I fell short of true friendship. These, too, can be teachable moments.
In the fall of my senior year at Sandy Springs High School a new student arrived. He was from southern California, and he fit the stereotype perfectly. With blond surfer good looks and an easy manner, he quickly stole the hearts of the girls at school and was the envy of all the guys, only we didn’t want to acknowledge his presence among us. And when he asked for permission to join the football team, along with my teammates I was not happy. After all, he had not suffered through the 2-a-day practices in August; he had not been among us all those years of Gray-Y and Pop Warner football at Chastain Park; he was a stranger among us—he was the “other.” We felt it unfair for the coach to let this latecomer to our little kingdom on the team at this late date. Not this year. This was our year. And so the cadre closed its ranks in an effort to ignore his existence. He didn’t seem to mind this, and quickly made friends with others at school who, according to the proscribed rules of a football oriented society, were also social outcasts. Truth told; we were jealous. And when the coach let him join the team, it only made matters worse. Problem was, he was very good. Lightening fast with excellent hands, he was perfect for our power-I option offense at the position of flanker. This also happened to be my position. So we shared starting duties over the course of a very good season, and I came to admire and learn from him. But I would not let him in. I was a reporter for the school paper during basketball season, and admired from the stands the translation of his skills from the gridiron to the basketball court—a gift I did not share. When track season began in the spring he replaced a dear friend on the sprint medley relay team, of which I was a member, and partly due to his speed we finished third in the state at the GHSA finals in Jefferson, setting a new school record in the process. One afternoon, late that spring, I found him sitting alone in the locker room. He was crying. I sat down next to him and asked him what was wrong. Slowly, his story unfolded: his father was a prominent LA psychiatrist who was an inveterate womanizer. My teammate had moved with his mother to a religious commune in northern California—what we would now call a cult, after his parents divorced. Slowly her mental health began to unravel, and he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Atlanta. His mother had just that week been committed to a state mental health institute, and his father was divorcing, yet again. He worried about his younger sister, who was becoming involved with drugs and alcohol, and he did not really want to go to college. It meant yet another change. He missed home back in California. I sat there and listened, and stewed in the juices of my own self-righteous jealousy. I realized that his good looks and easy manner had hidden his pain and that we, all of us who might have been his friends, had been instead effective gatekeepers to his emotional prison. I felt deeply ashamed. I tried over the last weeks of school to befriend him, but it was too late. The forces of time and destiny swept us up in a river of change, and after graduation I never saw him again. When our only measure is friendship with those who think like us, look like us, share our history and context, we become, dear one’s, victims of the very idols we create in the service of this way of being in the world. We lose touch with a sense of God’s grace and compassion and hospitality. And these outward and visible signs of integrity are not about who deserves what; not about our envy which is, after all, nothing more than a mask for the fear that we aren’t somehow enough to obtain whatever earthly kingdom we seek to secure us in our anxiety. Jealousy does not allow for the abundant grace and radical compassionate justice of the kingdom of heaven, and it prohibits true friendship…true love expressed through friendship. A Friendship Blessing from John O’Donohue reads this way: May you be blessed with good friends. May you learn to be a good friend to yourself. May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness. May this change you. May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you. May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging. May you treasure your friends. May you be good to them and may you be there for them; may they bring you all the blessings, challenges, truth, and light that you need for your journey. May you never be isolated. May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara. May I live this day Compassionate of heart, Clear in word, Gracious in awareness, Courageous in thought, Generous in love.”Amen.