The Cost of Friendship
Preacher: Rev Dr Canon Michael Brierley, Precentor, Worcester Cathedral
Readings: Acts 10:44-48; John 15:9-17
Invocation: May I be helped to speak in the name of the living God. Amen.
There’s something I need to tell you. I want to talk with you about something. If you’ve ever heard those words, or ever had a conversation that’s begun with them, you’ll know them as the prelude to a revelation, an involved exchange in which someone fills you in on what’s really going on
– something perhaps in a relationship that they wish to disclose; something perhaps that’s happened at work that they need to get off their chest; perhaps there’s been a change in their health which they need to let you know about. A conscious decision has been made to pass on some development.
The passing on of information may not be quite so conscious or so serious. Two people relaxing with a drink at the end of the day naturally relay what for them the day has been like. When we visit relatives, a good deal of time might be spent talking about events in our respective lives since last we were together.
Confiding, letting people know, filling them in, might be said to be an aspect of friendship. Today’s gospel reading rather puts the equation the other way round. It’s not so much that you fill someone in because they’re a friend; it’s rather that you make them a friend by filling them in. I do not call you servants any longer, says Jesus to his disciples, 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. The disclosure, the relaying itself, letting another know what things are really like, confers on them the status of friend. Friendship is that sharing with another: you make friends as you let down your guard and share with them the things concerning yourself. Jesus discloses everything to his disciples. He is an open book: he lays himself bare, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, for his friends, and that’s what constitutes his friendship with them. They’re friends of his precisely because he’s divulged to them the deepest parts of himself.
I’d like this morning to make three points about friendship, and that’s the first: friendship is constituted by disclosure. We see it in the intense friendship that is marriage. In marriages that go wrong, a warning signal can be that the partners stop telling each other what’s going on. A cordon is drawn around certain corners of their lives; there are compartments which they’re not willing to expose; there are aspects that become off limits. The deepest friendship doesn’t close off any areas; it doesn’t feature no-go zones. I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything. Christian ministers sometimes talk with couples who wish to be married in church for a second time. Church of England ministers are required to interview the couple to find out about the first time round: what they may have learnt, and what makes the new relationship work. Invariably, I find, what they say about the new relationship is that they communicate with each other. They say, ‘I didn’t communicate with my last spouse.’ Saying what’s going on makes the friendship.
I see it in my own experience. During the most difficult period of my life, I was helped by someone who up to that point was simply an acquaintance. As my crisis deepened, I came to share a great deal with them – every little development, every new email, every fresh conversation – and it’s absolutely no coincidence at all that that person has become a firmest friend. The sharing made the friendship. It’s no coincidence, surely, that Quakers are known as Friends – their worship is based simply on being together quietly, making room and space for each other to share and disclose.
We see it in today’s first reading – a pivotal moment in the Acts of the Apostles, the story of the early church. Hitherto, the gospel had spread among the Jewish people. In our reading, we heard of the point at which it became evident that the Holy Spirit was at work among the Gentiles. ‘Oh my goodness,’ you can hear Peter thinking. ‘They know. The Gentiles know what the faith is about. Therefore we must baptise them. How can we withhold baptising them?’ They know. So they must be friends. The knowledge makes the friendship.
Communication of what’s going on isn’t always verbal. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are his gesture of friendship to us. They’re his communication to us of what he is about. They’re his sitting down with us and telling us in all its grimness and its glory, what’s going on for him. And Jesus himself is God’s gesture of friendship towards us. Jesus is God letting us know what is going on for God; God saying to us ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’ I’d like to share with you what’s going on for me, and in sharing it with you, become your friend. We’re not friends first, and then tell each other what’s going on: the very act of sharing and receiving turns us into friends. I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything.
I say ‘sharing and receiving’ because friendship, to be full, complete, needs to be mutual: it’s receipt of what’s going on for the other, as much as imparting what’s going on for oneself. It’s making room to receive back what the other has to share, as well as offloading all that’s going on for you.
That double sense of sharing and receiving can be seen in Jesus’s words about laying down one’s life for one’s friends. It doesn’t just mean life laid down to the point of death – we think perhaps of war, in which that phrase is used to describe, even rationalise, soldiers’ sacrifices; we might think of Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Catholic priest who volunteered to die in place of another prisoner at Auschwitz; or the young man who last month dived into the Thames to save a woman who fell from London Bridge, at the cost of his own life. Jesus’s saying holds true at less extreme levels: friendship consists of laying oneself bare before others, and also at the same time disinvesting oneself in order to make room for the other to disclose – sharing and receiving.
Both aspects involve a cost – and this is the second point that I wish to make about friendship – that friendship has a cost: the cost of laying down one’s own needs in order to listen to and attend to the needs of the other; and potentially, in laying oneself bare and exposing oneself, the cost of betrayal. Information imparted in the hope of friendship might be misused against oneself: vulnerably laying down oneself opens oneself up to possible attack. From the very supper at which Jesus uttered these words about friendship, Judas went out to commit treachery, inflicting on Jesus the shock and pain encapsulated in psalm 55: ‘It was not an open enemy that reviled me, for then I could have borne it; nor was it my adversary that puffed himself up against me, but it was even you, one like myself, my companion and my own familiar friend. We took sweet counsel together, and walked with the multitude in the house of God.’ How could you do it? The sharing and receiving that constitute friendship bear the risk of cost.
And yet – and this is the third point about friendship – ‘I have said these things to you,’ says Jesus, ‘so that my joy may be in you, and [more than that,] your joy may be complete’; may be full. The friendship that’s constituted by the sharing of oneself and the faithful, patient receipt of the sharing of another, with all its attendant risk and cost, is worthwhile, because it brings a joy that nothing else can touch, a joy that refreshes the parts that other joys cannot reach. Friendship with others brings joy, friendship with God all the more still. John’s gospel excels in this theme of fullness, completion, abundance – in the water made wine, in ridiculous quantities; in the feeding of the five thousand (extraordinary extravagance!); in Jesus being anointed with perfume of staggering value; in Jesus saying that he has come to bring life in all its fullness. The friendship of mutual sharing with others; friendship with Jesus, disclosed in his death and resurrection; friendship with God, communicated in the Word made flesh; these bring the deepest possible joy.
What are you and I doing here, if not reciprocating God’s friendship towards us? What is prayer, what is worship, what is stillness, what is silence, if not our letting God know what’s going on for us, our friendship with God constituted by the sharing of ourselves?
I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything. May you and I make friends with one another, through mutual and risky sharing of everything; may you and I make friends with God, through a costly life of worship and prayer, making everything known to God just as God has made everything known to us, that we may know joy in all its fullness.