Friendship with God
Two individuals in the Bible are celebrated as being friends, or holding a place as a friend, of God. With Abraham, the language is unequivocal: he was a friend of God. The attribution of friendship is retrospective; in Genesis itself, where the story of Abraham unfolds, we do not find the claim of friendship. But later, in the strengthening words from God to his people that open the second part of Isaiah, we find this assurance: “Thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of Abraham my friend” (41:8). So does God comfort and upbuild his people by identifying them as the descendants (in a collective singular “thou”) of his friend, Abraham. In a reciprocal discourse, in the writings of the chronicler, the people make their plea to God in these significant words: “Art not thou our God, who didst drive out the inhabitants of this land before thy people Israel, and gavest it to the seed of Abraham thy friend for ever?” (2 Chron. 20:7). In this plea for God to act, the people make bold to identify their ancestor Abraham as God’s friend.
There is equality in friendship, as we saw Aristotle insist and as we have claimed is involved in love in general. Friendship also opens the way for a claim to be made upon the friend. Because God had a friendship with Abraham, his “seed” can advert boldly to that friendship for God’s continuing action on their behalf. And conversely, God, seeing the people in need of comfort, reminds them that they are descendants of his friend.
That Abraham was God’s friend in this unique way—namely, that he alone in the Scriptures is spoken of as “the friend” of God—continues even to the late writings of the New Testament. In the Epistle of Saint James we find, “The scripture was fulfilled which saith, Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness: and he was called the Friend of God” (2:23). Here it seems to be almost a title for Abraham and at the same time a summation of his life. The first scriptural appearance of love was when God told Abraham to sacrifice “thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest” (Gen. 22:2); the ensuing action was the climax of Abraham’s life of listening to God and being the father of a new people. The listening and being are summarized by James as “believing,” which gets counted as “righteousness.” All this is wrapped up in the single word friend. Friendship with God is the ultimate characteristic of the father of God’s people.
Moses, whom we might call the second founder of the people Israel, is likened unto a friend of God, although he is not said explicitly to be such. This simile, however, is not made retrospectively but comes rather as a contemporary description of Moses’ conversations with God. “And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exod. 33:11). This is said only once—in keeping with the general reluctance of the Old Testament to use friendship language between humans and God. But at the same time, it is decisive in holding up the high standard: if someone is going to be God’s friend, that person must have open discourse with God. Anything less would not be worthy to be called friendship.
Human Friends: David and Jonathan?
It is often said that the Bible’s great model of human friendship is the love of Jonathan and David. But a close reading makes that claim questionable. The actual word friend is not there.1 More importantly, the love that is shown in the text is unbalanced: it is mostly Jonathan’s love for David, with the Scriptures being significantly silent concerning whether and how David responds. As we will see, it is clear that Jonathan loves David, but the converse is at least an open question. Biblical narrative tends toward reticence, generally telling us only what people say and do. It is silent about their thoughts and motivations, yet those can be signaled by what the text does not say.2
We first see Jonathan in a battle. It is the second year of the reign of Israel’s first king, Saul, who is Jonathan’s father. Jonathan with a thousand men “smote the garrison of the Philistines that was in Geba,” and at Saul’s command a trumpet was blown “throughout all the land,” and “all Israel heard say that Saul had smitten a garrison of the Philistines” (1 Sam. 13:3–4). The text says that Jonathan did the smiting, while the report from Saul’s command is that Saul did it—foreshadowing a strain between father and son that will mark all that follows and revealing as well Saul’s unfitness for the kingship.
Shortly thereafter, when the Philistines have gathered against Israel in frightful numbers, Jonathan ventures a courageous move. Going alone and secretly, he says to his armor bearer that “there is no restraint to the LORD to save by many or by few” (1 Sam. 14:6). In the event, the Lord saves by few: Jonathan and his armor bearer alone slay about twenty men, and their unexpected and successful attack sends a “trembling” throughout the Philistines, who begin to run away. Saul’s army sees the enemies’ flight, runs after them, and wins a victory. But Saul puts an oath of fasting upon his army, which Jonathan unwittingly breaks and thus brings upon himself a curse: a second incident of the father working against his son and a further sign that the king is unsuited to his position. When it is revealed that Jonathan is the one who has broken the oath (an oath he knew nothing about and, when learning of it, declared unwise), Saul pronounces, “Thou shalt surely die, Jonathan” (14:44). But the people argue a bit of sense into Saul and rescue Jonathan, thus saving the hero of the day from death.
David enters after the narrative has decisively established the unfitness of Saul. His entrance is twofold.3 First, he enters Saul’s court as a man “who is a cunning player on an harp” and who thereby can dispel Saul’s evil spirits. Saul “loved him greatly; and he became his armourbearer” (1 Sam. 16:16, 21). But he also enters in the story of Goliath (chap. 17), courageously risking an independent action much like Jonathan’s. These two stories together establish David as someone with a spirit like Jonathan’s but who, unlike Jonathan, can master Saul’s passions and receive Saul’s love. The text emphasizes David’s cunningness through all this. Before he takes up against Goliath, he repeatedly asks, and repeatedly hears, the things Saul has promised to the man who defeats Goliath: “The king will enrich him with great riches, and will give him his daughter, and make his father’s house free in Israel” (17:25; cf. vv. 26, 30). His repeated questioning, when he already knows the answer, shows David to be not only the beautiful musician but also someone alert to seize his chance.
This cunning, in a word, is the problem with seeing the relationship of Jonathan and David as a biblical model of friendship. Even when David is publicly emotive and the hearts of many go out to him, we cannot forget his shrewdness; and while Jonathan clearly loves David, it is hard to find in the text clear evidence that David returns this love. The strongest protestation of love for Jonathan is in the poem that David composed to mark the death of Saul and Jonathan, a poem that is state poetry for public consumption (2 Sam. 1:19–27).4 It shows David as magnanimous to his enemies: it is a performance that he cannot but know will lift him in the eyes and affection of his people. “The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!” (v. 19). The poem nobly links together Saul and Jonathan with prowess in fighting, with courage; they were “lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided” (v. 23); they were like eagles and lions. This is manifestly less than the whole truth, as we know all too much of Saul’s failures, and we remember his conflict with his son established in the text from the beginning. The poem speaks of Jonathan alone only toward its end: “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (v. 26). Yet even this affectionate, presumably heartfelt, and public language of “brother” and “love” contains ambiguities, for the entire David narrative makes it clear that David’s love of women is often instrumental.5 Moreover, when David speaks of the love of women for him, we note that even here David’s speech is of Jonathan’s love for him. We find, at best, a slight attestation of David’s love for Jonathan: “Very pleasant hast thou been unto me,” a love for him that was “wonderful.” And that’s all.6
It would be wrong to exaggerate all this into a one-sided portrayal of David as a heartless, feeling-less, Machiavellian calculator. A good deal of what people loved about David was that they saw him openly passionate, for instance, when dancing in front of the ark (2 Sam. 6). But we must also note the places where the Scriptures are silent about David’s love. At the beginning of 1 Samuel 18, we find, “The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” It is not said that David loved Jonathan. Two verses later, it says that Jonathan and David made a covenant, “because he loved him as his own soul.” Again, although a covenant is a mutual agreement, the text does not say that David loved Jonathan. Jonathan gives David his robe and his sword and his bow—princely gifts—but no reciprocal gift is made: the imbalance makes it look like Jonathan is giving his kingly inheritance to David (and indeed he says explicitly later, “Thou shalt be king over Israel” [1 Sam. 23:17]). In chapter 19 we read that Jonathan “delighted much in David” and thus would not kill him, as Saul ordered, but we do not read that David delighted in Jonathan. In chapter 20, we read, “Jonathan made a covenant with the house of David” that David, when God had defeated all his enemies, would show “the kindness of the LORD” to him and would kill neither him nor his descendants (vv. 14–16). And Jonathan made David swear that he would not kill him, because Jonathan loved him “as he loved his own soul” (v. 17). Again, this stands without a counterbalance, as nothing is said of David’s love of Jonathan. Jonathan is helping David survive the deadly anger of Saul; David obviously needs that help, but he does not express love. Only at their parting is there reciprocity: “David arose . . . and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded” (v. 41). Yet even here, what immediately follows are words of Jonathan’s, his reminder of the vow they made according to which David would not kill Jonathan. In their final meeting, when Saul is at war seeking David’s life, Jonathan comes to David to strengthen “his hand in God,” and they make a covenant before the Lord (23:16–18). This, at last, is truly reciprocal and political; it is Jonathan’s reminder to David of their previous promise, which is now strengthened, even as Jonathan is undermining his father’s battle.
To work through all these details is to see how difficult it is to claim (no matter how often one hears the claim repeated) that the Bible portrays David and Jonathan as exemplary friends. It seems plausible not only that David was truly “distressed” at his loss of Jonathan but also that Jonathan had been useful and pleasant—important elements of friendship but not, on David’s side, the highest.
Yet if we look elsewhere, we can indeed find a strange and important depiction of friendship in the Bible, one that is often ignored. It involves Job.
Job: The Bible’s Picture of Real Friendship
The book of Job is wildly misunderstood and hugely underestimated for its human wisdom—that is to say, its godly wisdom about what it means to be human. At least in significant part, it is a book about real human friendship (and a hint of divine). If we read it with the question of friendship in mind, it will show us that friendship is difficult, that friends should be tenacious, and that friendship is the best thing in human life.
Friendship’s importance is flagged from the outset of the book. Catastrophic things happen to Job. “Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him,” and immediately they went to him “to mourn with him and to comfort him” (Job 2:11). When evil strikes, the appropriate thing is for friends to gather round. And the task of friends is, first, simply to be with their friend in trouble, “to mourn with him”; but their task is also to build up or strengthen their friend, “to comfort him” (remembering that “comfort” means to strengthen; it draws from fortis, Latin for “strong” or “brave”).
In the event, Job’s friends are able to do only the first. They mourn with him. They are in fact so affected by the sight of him in his trouble that they are speechless: “They sat with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him” (Job 2:13). The friends do not presume to try to comfort him with words that, assuredly, would be inadequate to the evil that has befallen Job. I marvel at their silence, their waiting, their mournful solidarity—this is a good model of true friendship.
It is Job who breaks the silence. The disputes for which the book is famous occur only after their joint silence and Job’s cursing of the day of his birth. The responses of Job’s friends, the offense that they take to his words, his counter-responses, their escalating disagreements—all this is too complex for us to work through in detail. It is enough to note that they do not run away from but stick with each other, albeit increasingly convinced that the other is wrong on some of the most serious matters of life. Even at the end of speech—“So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes” (Job 32:1)—his friends do not leave him. Silent they may be to the end of the book—and mistaken! But they do not leave their friend Job.
At the climax of the book, “the LORD answer[s] Job” (Job 38:1), which is what Job has wanted all along—to speak with God as a man speaks to a man, not, does he say, as a friend to a friend but as a person in court can put questions and demand answers. But the answer the Lord gives Job is not an answer to his questions, explicit or implicit; it is something altogether unexpected. “Gird up now thy loins like a man,” God says (38:3)—Robert Sacks of St. John’s College points to a Hebrew particle here that suggests an invitation, as if God were saying “please.”7 God, inviting Job to rise up to his humanity, addresses questions to Job—“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” and so forth (38:4)—but Job of course cannot answer. The effect of the questions is to elevate Job out of his human-centric world and take him on a tour of the universe, from its beginning to the present. It is as if Job is carried back to the big bang and asked what his role in that had been, as if God takes him through the vast expanses of the empty space of the universe to the galaxies and dust and strange things that humans never see, as if God shows him how the universe at large is no place for a man to be.
At the end of Job’s journey he beholds Leviathan. This wild beast is untamable. He cannot be spoken to. He will not play with Job. He is utterly indifferent to the world and literally impenetrable. God shows him to Job and asks, “Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?” (Job 41:7). The question is rhetorical; Leviathan has a hide that is impervious to harm. And Job surely reflects on how different he is from this Leviathan: he, Job, a human being, has a skin that can be eaten away with disease and sores—can be, and has been. Job is not impervious. He is a human being, and he is vulnerable.
What Job sees, in other words, is that while there is no explanation to be given for the evils that come upon human beings (or at least no complete explanation of all the evils), there is still something wonderful about God giving people a place in the universe to live, a place where friendship is possible. And so Job returns to his home and does what is needed for that to happen. He recognizes (better than “repents”8) that he is—that all people are—“dust and ashes,” and so he prays for his friends, the Lord accepts his prayer, and their friendship is restored.
The final scene of the book of Job is a picture of human communion. “There came unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters,9 and all they that had been of his acquaintance before, and did eat bread with him in his house.” Friends, family, and acquaintances, all together, all eating bread in Job’s house. And what are they doing together? “They bemoaned him, and comforted him over all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him: every man also gave him a piece of money, and every one an earring of gold” (Job 42:11). What they do is what friends do for a friend upon whom evil has come—the intention of Job’s friends in chapter 2 is fulfilled here in chapter 42. They mourn with him and they comfort him, they strengthen him in the very practical, material help of money and gold. But the comfort lies also in the recognition, and the acceptance, that the Lord did indeed bring evil upon him. The friends too have learned something. They do not deny that life is hard, that justice is not always obtained, that bad things happen in ways that cannot be explained. Unlike in their earlier speeches, here they accept hardship, evil, Job’s innocence—they accept it all, and they are together with him in friendship, sharing company and food and, one imagines, stories and happiness.
I think Job’s friends are able to accept the world as it is because Job has accepted it, has found a strange wonder in it. Job’s reconciliation comes through what God showed him: that a human being is a little thing in the world, a precious thing with whom God is willing to talk, yet an exceedingly vulnerable thing, and thus what we need more than anything else is each other, is friendship. The book of Job ends with the news that Job gives an inheritance to his daughters along with his sons—the only instance in the Old Testament that daughters are treated equally with their brothers.10 This is no accident: it flows from what Job has come to understand about the importance of human beings one to another. It is a concrete sign of the sort of change that can be brought about by the difficult achievement of friendship.
I believe the book of Job does not show us an answer to the problem of evil but rather an answer to the question of human nature. What are we humans really? Job says: we are precious beings, capable of discourse with God, beings who should strive to accomplish friendship with each other.
Friendship: The Mission of Jesus
In this way, Job is a preparation for the gospel, for the point of the incarnation is achieved when Jesus establishes friendship.
Friendship, one might think, seems a minor part of Jesus’ message. We remember that Jesus was called “a friend of publicans and sinners” (Matt. 11:19; Luke 7:34)—a slur against Jesus that is reported ironically, for indeed he was a friend of sinners and people, like tax collectors (the “publicans”), who were despised. And there are instances of Jesus speaking positively of friends in some parables, for instance, the person invited to a wedding banquet who takes the lowest seat but then hears joyfully the words “Friend, go up higher” (Luke 14:10). Nonetheless, there seems to be much teaching about the kingdom of God that does not refer to friends, and Jesus’ own ministry of calling the Twelve is generally taken to be the formation of a renewed people of God, or a school of disciples, students whom he is shaping to carry on his mission after he is gone—people over whom he is the head, not people with whom he is equal as would be a friend.
But if we go deeper, it becomes clear that establishing friendship was Jesus’ mission. Saint John reveals friendship’s centrality to what Jesus was doing in his account of the Last Supper, which takes up nearly a fourth of his Gospel (chaps. 13–17). Famously, John replaces the novel words of Jesus over the bread and wine with his equally novel washing of the disciples’ feet. He establishes the context as one of Jesus’ complete command of the situation. He “knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world.” He had “loved his own which were in the world,” and he is loving them “unto the end.” The supper was ended, and Jesus grasped the entirety of his mission, “that the Father had given all things into his hands,” that “he was come from God” and was going “to God.” In this context, John shifts into the present tense, “He riseth from supper,” as if to put us there on the scene. He “laid aside his garments” and then (present tense again) “poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples’ feet.” When this was done, he took “his garments” and sat “down again” (13:1–12).
Saint John frames the footwashing event in the context of Jesus’ self-consciousness of the incarnation as a whole: his coming from God and his return to God or, as we say, his being incarnate of the virgin Mary, dying, being buried, and rising again to ascend to his Father’s right hand. He knows he has come from God and is going to God. The action in itself, however, is an interpretive mime of his immanent death and resurrection, as Saint John understands them. For this evangelist, Jesus’ death does not come over Jesus, but rather Jesus lays down his own life. Jesus is in charge. After accomplishing his death, he takes up his life again. All this was laid out when he spoke of himself as the good shepherd (John 10:14–18). Just so, at the Last Supper, he lays aside his garments, which stand for his life, and when he has accomplished his purpose (here symbolized by washing feet), he takes up his garments again, as indeed he will rise on the third day.11
Following this action, Jesus speaks to his disciples. It is his last chance to shape them. He prepares them for persecution; he predicts his betrayal and Judas goes out, but no one save Jesus (and perhaps the beloved disciple) knows why; he strengthens their hearts and tries to lead their minds into the truth. At the end, he prays for them at length.
In the middle of these five chapters, at the center between the footwashing and the prayer, Saint John puts the central point of what Jesus has done with his disciples: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” What it means to be a friend is to be willing to die for one’s friends. Jesus is about to die, and he makes it explicit for his disciples: “Ye are my friends.” He then goes on to make a point about this friendship that is consonant with the classical saying that friends share all things: “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you” (15:13–15). That is to say, the friends of Jesus share Jesus’ mind. Everything his Father has told him—all of that is now known by Jesus’ friends. Indeed, that is why they are friends.
When Jesus tells the disciples they are his friends, he adds what looks like a conditional clause: “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you” (John 15:14). This is worth some thought. By what follows immediately (Jesus’ explanation that they are not servants but friends because he has shared his mind with them), it is clear that whatever Jesus commands is something they will understand. Jesus will not command his friends as a servant might be commanded, where one might be told to do something without knowing why or what it is about. Jesus’ commands are all intelligible.
This, by the way, is why hearing is at the heart of obedience. The “-edi-” in “obedience” is from audire, from which we also get “audio”: obedience is about hearing with someone else (in hippie jargon, being tuned in to the same wavelength). I can recall my Oklahoma grandmother asking, “Do you hear me?”—meaning, did I understand what she wanted me to do. True obedience is not so much a bending of the will as it is a work of the intellect leading the will.
Furthermore, it is love and nothing else that Jesus has commanded: “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you” (John 15:12). So to live as friends, to demonstrate that greatest love, which is the willingness to die for one’s friends, is what Jesus commands his disciples. But it is a commandment only in the sense that it points out what must be the case if we are Jesus’ friends. The friends of Jesus are friends of one another and so are willing to die for one another. One cannot be Jesus’ friend alone: “Ye are my friends,” he says (v. 14); “ye are,” plural, not “thou art,” singular.
Following the revelation of friendship, Jesus returns to the love of one another, repeating it as his command and pointing out that, as his friends, they will share such hatred as he himself has borne. But as he has overcome “the world” (here to be understood as that part of creation in ultimate rebellion against God), so shall they. We find a similar point made by Jesus in Saint Luke’s Gospel, in the one other place where Jesus calls his disciples friends: “And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do” (12:4). The encouragement to face death, if necessary, is appropriately made to “my friends” by one whose executioners then had “no more that they [could] do.”
Saint John shows us two additional and important elements of friendship with Jesus: it is personal, and it is expansive. I noted above that John’s Last Supper account, covering five chapters, begins with the footwashing as a mime of Jesus’ death and resurrection. This interpretation draws on the good shepherd discourse of chapter 10: “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. . . . I lay down my life for the sheep. . . . No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (vv. 11, 15, 18). In that same discourse, Jesus emphasizes his personal relationship with the sheep, the sign of which is that he knows them by name and they hear his voice and follow him: “The sheep hear [the shepherd’s] voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, . . . and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice. . . . I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine” (vv. 3–4, 14).
Significantly, the one instance Saint John gives us of Jesus calling someone by name, who from his voice and the spoken name recognizes him, does not involve one of the disciples—not even the beloved disciple, who had visited the tomb just before—but a woman, Mary Magdalene. She is distraught not only over Jesus’ death but even more so over the loss of his body: “They have taken away my LORD, and I know not where they have laid him” (20:13). Jesus is suddenly behind her and asks why she is weeping, whom she is seeking. She takes him for the gardener and says, “Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.” The narrative continues, “Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master” (vv. 15–16). With these few words, Saint John brilliantly weaves together threads from the Last Supper and the good shepherd discourse: John 15 points to John 10, which then is fulfilled in John 20. Jesus, who lays down his life for his friends, has the power to take it up again and knows his sheep by name; they recognize him and are his. Here we see that Mary Magdalene is also one of Jesus’ friends.
The friendship of Jesus is personal and expansive. There are always “other sheep” who also “shall hear my voice” (John 10:16). But although there are more and more sheep, there is never the distance of anonymity. Friendship is the intimacy of a common mind. Every one is known by name; every one who hears can follow; every one who follows is a friend.
To say it again: it is to establish friendship that Jesus undertook the incarnation, obedient to and fully comprehending of his Father’s intention. He is of one mind with his Father, and his friends are of one mind with him, loving one another.
But Do We Want to Be Jesus’ Friends?
The Gospel was from John 15, including the words “I have called you friends”; the occasion was the installation of the new dean of St. Matthew’s, the Episcopal cathedral in Dallas. The preacher allowed that it sounds pretty good to be Jesus’ friend. There are lots of perks: you get to be close to Jesus; you get to know what he is thinking. But then it might dawn on you that, as his friend, he can call on you anytime. You’re never “off duty,” as it were. If something is bothering Jesus, he is going to want to share it with you. If he is concerned about a family, worried about a child, thinking of someone who is alone, he might ask something of you. If he wants people to understand him better, to have a chance to move from ignorance into truth, he might call on you. You’re his friend, right? To share the mind of Christ is to share so much: the burden of illness, of mental suffering, of confusion, of oppression. It is so heavy. It is a cross. It is a willingness to hand over one’s life for the sake of the friend.
Do you really want that? Do we want it? Do I want a friendship that’s sealed in death?
The Weird Intimacy of God
I think it is clear: the biblical revelation tells us that God sent Jesus in order to establish friendship with himself and among human beings. Yet while clear, it is not trumpeted; in fact, one must read the text carefully and trace certain threads across both testaments in order to grasp it. More traditionally, other scriptural themes and images are emphasized. The Bible is read as a narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. Redemption involves God’s commitment to rescue and restore humanity from its self-wrought alienation from himself. In the catechism of the Episcopal Church, for instance, sin is said to have brought about disharmony, a fracturing of right relationships all around. As a result of sin, we humans are out of harmony with God, with one another, with the created world, and indeed even within ourselves. Salvation is the healing of these broken relationships, bringing reconciliation and peace with God, with one another, within our own persons, and with the creation at large.
“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself,” writes Saint Paul to the Corinthians. And the mission of reconciliation continues: God “hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:19). Does speaking of friendship add anything to reconciliation?
It adds a dimension of depth, if friendship is understood in its primary sense. Friendship in all the forms it takes is primarily a love between people based on the good. So with regard to the created order and to our own internal order as persons, friendship would not be used in its primary sense. We can be in harmony with the creation, and we can have an integral personality without a divided will, but we can be friends properly neither with the ecosphere nor with ourselves. (The reader may recall, from chapter 2 above, Aristotle raising the question of self-love.) Yet when we turn to our relationships with other people, if the point of the incarnation is to enable us to live together as friends, that shows us the astonishing stretch of the gospel. Not just to live with others in a certain peace, not just to help others as best we can, not just to share the good and pursue it with those who are close to us but to have that closeness of common life and common mind with every other redeemed person (and not forgetting that we may dare hope that every person be a redeemed person)12—this is the specificity that “friendship” brings to the mandate of reconciliation. To love one another as Jesus has loved us, to see the explosive possibilities of “one another” being expanded without limit, and nonetheless not to water down this intimacy but to have it as friendship—all this is, it seems to me, weird.
Weird, and prima facie impossible. But before we draw back from this conclusion and dilute the gospel vision (making it something more palatable or “reasonable”), we must also note that friendship adds content to reconciliation—not merely clarifying it but saying more—when we are talking about reconciliation with God. It might have been possible for God to overcome our fall and restore us to a sinless state without making us his friends. God might have put us back in paradise without establishing friendship with us. It is conceivable to take the fall as our rejection of our place as creatures of God and our prideful attempt to usurp God’s place as creator and then, in some way, to conceive our redemption as our restoration to our proper creaturely place. But this is not the story the biblical narrative tells. Rather, the Bible is a story of God wanting to love us, to speak to us, to raise us in some way above the level of creature so that we could speak to him and love him. Abraham his friend, and Moses, and the chosen people, and the prophets—all are there to show us this desire of God. Herbert McCabe claims that the most important thing Jesus says is that the Father loves him.13 In Jesus, the love of God with a human being is consummated, made factual and actual, made real. Jesus as a real person in history established that it is possible for God and a human being to love each other. As Aristotle says, if it’s actual, it’s possible.
Weird as it may be, it is still true: we can be friends with God.
This double weirdness—of human friendship with God and of human friendship extended expansively to other people—is the point of the Bible. Yet it remains much less than perfectly clear. How, for instance, can we take friendship as the point of the gospel if Christian love is supposed to be love of everyone?