Have you ever thought of yourself as a friend of God?
And what an unusual piece of scripture we have before us this morning. If you are like me, you think of friend as a more casual word, not a word meant for the one called the King of Kings and Lord of Lords that we know as Jesus
In our gospel lesson for the day, we are told this earth shattering, game changing fact– for those of us who are on the journey of getting to know Jesus– we are called Jesus’ friend.
Look with me at verse 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.”
As we consider today the idea of being in friendship with Jesus, such could have a multitude of different meanings based on your life experiences– what having friends in your life has meant to you.
For some of us, our friends become like our family, those in whom we claim among our dearest of the dear. For others of us, having and maintaining friendships has become one of the most frustrating types of relationships in our lives because they haven’t come easy to us. For, as fast as some of us seem to make friends, we lose them.
For it is true that friends can be some of life’s greatest blessings or some of life’s greatest headaches, right?
A friend to you might be someone who we know and love and share some of life’s best and worst times alongside, but sometimes friends are those people who abandon us when hard times come. Sometimes when supposed friends smell trouble in the waters that surround our life they jump out faster than we have time to blink.
A friend might be someone who we trust with everything, share our secrets and our deepest thoughts, but sometimes such friends are those who break our hearts worst than known enemies. Sometimes friends are those who share what we never wanted any other ears to hear– stabbing our hearts deeper than we ever could have imagined.
A friend to you might be someone in whom you can call to visit if you need to borrow something or who can tag along with you to an activity you both enjoy, but sometimes friends are people who are people who don’t really know us at all. We may spent time we them, but never do our conversations flow into the deep waters of what makes life, life (drama of course). We can be easily surrounded by “friends” and feel like we have no friends at all.
So when Jesus, in his final discourse to the disciples in John’s gospel calls us friends, we might find ourselves confused, unimpressed or altogether unsure of what being identified as Jesus’ friend might mean for us.
Friendship– how we identify who is our friend, how we relate to our friends, and ultimately what it means to have friends in our lives has been something that philosophers and theologians have been writing about for centuries. In the 5th century B.C.E. philosopher Pythagorus famously said, “Friends have all things in common.” Aristotle is remembered for saying, “Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.” Great theologian Thomas Aquians said, “There is nothing on this earth to be more prized than friendship.”
Because even though we all struggle with the question of who are our friends and what it means to give and receive love from them — at the end of the day, we all, in one way or another want to know that somebody is our friend. Helen Keller once said: “Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.” And, I 100% agree.
And, Jesus calls all of us FRIENDS.
Earlier in John 15, the gospel writer gave us one of the greatest metaphors in all of the stories of Jesus. We are told by the Lord that “I am the vine and you are the branches.” In such a descriptor of a plant– something we all can all understand, we are told of how we are not just lowly human beings like puppets being manipulated by a divine on a string. No, we are told that we are part of the main event, with our proper place of course: we are the branches and Jesus is the vine but a part of the stalk of the plant nonetheless. We our were made to be interconnected with the work of our vine– Jesus.
Jesus says, “I do not call you servants any longer . . . I have called you friends. For a servant does not know their master’s business” but in friendship, we are given a relational way to live among God. Not as lower class citizens. But, as partners. . . . as we abide in God, we know and can do what it is God is already doing. As friends, we are included in the community of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
But what does this mean? If we befriend Jesus, what might our lives begin to look like?
Look with me at verse 13: “Greater love have no man than this, than a man lay down his life for his friends.”