The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!”
—Luke 7:34
Miss Jean, my favorite Sunday school teacher, held up a picture of Jesus surrounded by children. He seemed to be laughing, and boys and girls were sitting next to him or on his lap and hanging around his neck. A girl, whom I imagined to be me, leaned her head on his arm. “Jesus loves little children,” Miss Jean said reassuringly. “He will always be your friend.” She put down the poster and read from the Bible: “Jesus said, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven’” (Matt. 19:14, RSV).
About fifteen of us sat in a circle. Miss Jean again said, “Jesus is your friend,” before we sang:
Jesus loves me, this I know,
for the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to him belong;
they are weak, but he is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
The Bible tells me so.
If Miss Jean said Jesus was my friend, then Jesus was my friend.
That song was the first theology I learned. Jesus loved children, and he was a loyal friend, one who protected those he loved. We sang that song in Sunday school and at bedtime. I sometimes sang it in the bath or while walking to school. “Jesus Loves Me” was the soundtrack of my early life. I was the little girl in the picture, and Jesus was my friend.
* * *
“Friend” seems a gentle way of understanding Jesus, yet it is often mocked. Atheists sometimes ridicule Christians as having an “invisible friend.” But the criticism is not limited to atheists. I have heard famous preachers and theologians explicitly attack the idea of Jesus as friend as juvenile and instead argue for a more “mature” Jesus. Even churchgoers dismiss certain worship songs as “Jesus is my boyfriend” music. Those who engage in such mockery might be surprised to learn that much of this goes back to Sigmund Freud, who concluded that God, the “invisible friend,” was an illusion, a fairy tale, a projection, “an infantile prototype,” and a neurosis.1
The Bible tells a different story about friendship with God, especially in the Hebrew scriptures. Friendship is anything but immaturity; it is a gift of wisdom: “In every generation [wisdom] passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets” (Wisd. of Sol. 7:27). Two of Israel’s greatest heroes, Abraham, the father of faith, and Moses, the liberating prophet, are specifically called friends of God. In Isaiah 41:8, God refers to Abraham as “my friend,” a tradition that carries into the New Testament (James 2:23). Of Moses, Exodus says: “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (33:11), a very rare intimacy, for such close proximity to the divine usually meant death (33:20).
Despite the uniqueness of seeing “face to face,” sacred friendship also appears in other places and to other biblical characters. Indeed, Moses married into a clan whose family name was Reuel, meaning “friend of God.” The point is that friendship with God establishes the covenant—and that Israel is freed from bondage into a new family forged by friendship through the law given by Moses. Friendship with God is not a biblical side story; rather, it is central to the promises and faithfulness of being a called people, in which all are friends, companions, intimates, siblings, and beloved.
Early Christians, most of whom were Jews, knew all of this and extended the idea of divine friendship to Jesus. The New Testament vividly recounts the closeness of Jesus’s circle of friends, women and men transformed through their relationship with him. The only episode in which Jesus cries is at the tomb of Lazarus, whom he referred to as “our friend.” Indeed, Jesus instructed his friends to pray to “Abba” (as we can assume he himself prayed), a term most often rendered as “Father” in English, but one that contains shades of meaning denoting intimacy and familiarity, including that of fraternal relations like “brother” or “companion,” and is related to the Hebrew word for “friend” (ahab), used to describe Abraham.
Thus, Jesus introduces his friends (the disciples) to his other friend (God) in the daily prayer known as the “Our Father,” perhaps the spirit of which is better captured by “Our Father-Friend” or just “Our Friend.” This idea of “Our Friend in heaven” was a revolutionary one, as Jesus, acting as a mediator of divine companionship, collapsed the sacred distance between God and us. That thread of insight is found scattershot in the tradition, appearing in comments of theologians like St. Gregory of Nyssa, who linked the tradition of Moses as God’s friend with Jesus when he wrote, “Christ is our true friend.”2
With due respect to critics and Dr. Freud, in my experience, that is exactly who Jesus was to me as a child: my friend. I had one close childhood friend who moved to Ohio shortly before kindergarten. Otherwise, I was a fairly isolated girl. There was an empty lot across the street from our house, the last stand of trees in a Baltimore neighborhood that had once been a great wood. I played there, alone except for Jesus, acting out fairy tales and Bible stories, making art of rocks and twigs. He was my first companion as I noticed moss and watched birds, as I lay on the ground and looked up through autumn leaves to the bright blue sky.
At church, Miss Jean told the story of God walking around with Adam and the pair naming all the animals, “The Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (Gen. 2:19, RSV). The wooded lot was my own private Garden of Eden, and Jesus walked with me there, just as the grown-ups sang in the big church on Sundays:
And he walks with me, and he talks with me,
And he tells me I am his own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
There were no divisions between the worlds for me—neighborhood and family and church and world existed together, all mixed up with the Bible. When I was three, I remember the adults speaking reverently about a man who lived in a white house (I thought they said he rode a “white horse”), and, when he was killed, I wondered if he might rise from the dead like Jesus. A preacher on television spoke about having a dream of children playing together—that sounded nice to me—but my uncle said the man was a Communist. I asked Miss Jean what a Communist was and if they were in the Bible.
One December, figurines went missing from our manger scene. After a frantic search, my mother found the Blessed Virgin and her baby behind the wheel of my orange toy convertible conversing with a bikini-clad Barbie. I had moved the Holy Family into the spare bedroom at Barbie and Ken’s house, thinking that a suburban two-story was better for Jesus than growing up in a barn. Jesus lived easily in all these worlds—the woods, in the White House, on the television news, and with my dolls. “I do not call you servants any longer,” Jesus said to his followers, “but I have called you friends” (John 15:15). Yes, Jesus loves me. And Jesus was the best invisible friend any little girl could ever have.
In the Beginning
In the film Miracle on 34th Street, a bitter Doris Walker raises her little girl, Susan, to never believe in fairy tales. Although the story focuses on Doris’s eventual conversion from cynicism to love, young Susan’s transformation is just as interesting. Susan seems old before her time, like a world-weary adult. She has no friends her own age and even sneers that the other children she knows are immature. Once Kris Kringle befriends Susan, however, her world opens to the power of imagination and, in a very real sense, she becomes a child. The point is not that she comes to believe in Santa Claus or fairy tales; rather, it is that Susan herself now became the child her mother forced her to deny.
We often associate friendship with children and even arrange “playdates” to encourage it in them. Go to your local library or bookshop and look at the children’s section. Scores of books are about finding a friend, being a friend, welcoming others into friendship, crossing boundaries to be friends, befriending outsiders, overcoming loneliness through friendship, working with friends, and treating friends well. Children’s literature is a world of friendship, one populated by boys and girls from all ethnicities and races, animals and pets of all kinds, and even elements of nature. In addition to all the general books about friendship, there are dozens of books from specific faith traditions about it—stories of friendship from the Bible, the life of Jesus, Jewish history, and the lives of Islamic heroes.
If the books we read to children are any indication, friendship may well be the very first virtue we teach and the highest value for which we wish them to strive. Certainly, stories of friendship are the earliest stories many of us hear, and their resonance stays with us through life. The lessons learned from those first words remain compelling: be yourself, welcome others, practice kindness, and play well together.
When my daughter was young, I read to her all the time—and I would wind up crying over the stories. I think I loved some of the books more than she did; I remember marveling at the wonders of a playground détente, the joy of a new girl moving in to the empty house next door, the awkwardness of an elephant and a pig being friends, and the change in the rainbow fish who learned to share. And it is not just books—it is the entire world we create for children in film, video, and animation and through games and play.
My daughter accepted the lessons easily; I cried when reading because I knew how hard it would be. We teach our children to be friends and then we ourselves forget the teaching. Surely the playground is not Eden, but it may well be one of the few places where we still strive to create a community of friends who know freedom, trust, and mutual joy. We think friendship is juvenile, but it is not. Friendship may well be the hardest thing of all. Maybe that is why we encourage friendship in the youngest in our midst, hoping against hope that they may do a better job with it than we did.
It is not, perhaps, surprising that the first story in the Bible is about friendship. In the opening chapters of Genesis, God is lonely and wants a friend. Of course, it does not say that directly, for most theologies depict God as perfect and complete, with no need for anything beyond God’s own self. But when I read those pages, God, at the very least, seems bored by divine isolation. So God creates, almost as if at play in the cosmos. All sorts of things come forth: day and night; water and sky; oceans and earth; plants and trees; sun, moon, and stars; all the fish and animals and creatures of every kind. The last artistic flourish is humankind; God made male and female to be friends, companions, and lovers and to bring forth children, just so no one will ever be lonely again. What was a brooding, chaotic universe becomes a realm at play, one in which everything and everyone is harmonious, a circle of friends caring for and with all, and God said it was very good.
Friendship is an important theme in the biblical creation stories. In the beginning, God walks with Adam and Eve in mutual delight. These friends share the same spirit—the breath of God—and a common vocation to tend and attend creation. Often religious people read Genesis as deadly serious, maintaining that it is about sin and punishment, but when I read those first pages, I always laugh. God makes man from the dust of the ground, watered by a spring, and gives him everything. But the man is not happy even when he has all of creation at hand. To keep boredom at bay, he names all the animals—rather like an only child naming stuffed toys—a venture that winds up being deeply unsatisfying. It is hard to imagine feeling somehow incomplete when one has God’s total attention and the entire animal kingdom as companions, but Adam must have been a uniquely needy guy.
So God makes a new friend for him, the woman Eve, whose name means “life.” When he sees her, Adam proclaims, “Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” (2:23), a pronouncement that may be the best description of true friendship ever. Adam was incomplete without a partner, the one whose friendship finally gave him life. Thus, Adam and Eve become spouses, but this is always a story about more than an exclusive friendship of two. In Genesis, a sacred circle of friends forms within the circle of creation, in the delight of uncomplicated trust; the first act in biblical history is oneness of three, mutual vulnerability with no shame. Kindred souls, playmates, friends. Man, woman, God.
We are pretty far from Eden, but we see the qualities that make for friends most often in children. Although it is more than possible to romanticize children and friendship (and to forget the indignities of the playground), we remember our own childhood friendships and marvel at the capacity of the children in our lives to make friends. As one writer says simply, “A friend is someone fun to play with—and someone you can trust.”3 Children get that. By adulthood, however, most people, bullied and wounded by betrayal, have forgotten how to play. But imagine Jesus in that way—playful and trustworthy.
When we consider friendship one of the primary spiritual purposes of creation, other biblical stories emerge in new ways. The lovely story of Jesus and children that Miss Jean showed us a picture of in Sunday school is told in the gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew (where the incident is actually told twice!). As word of the loving rabbi Jesus spreads through Israel, people begin to bring their children to Jesus that he might bless them. The disciples rebuke them, but Jesus, in turn, rebukes them: “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs” (Matt. 19:14). Most scholars interpret this text on the basis of the low social standing of children in the ancient world—children ranked only slightly higher than slaves with regard to status and rights. That Jesus invited them to his side is not particularly unusual given his propensity to welcome all sorts of outcasts and marginalized people, as he envisioned an upside-down world where those who were last would be first.
But when we combine the creation story’s emphasis on friendship with Jesus’s welcome of children, something else comes to the fore. Does Jesus welcome children only because of their low status? Perhaps Jesus is welcoming them because they somehow understand all this, intuit it, better than older people. In the ancient world, friendship between adults became caught up in labyrinthine structures of patronage, debt, kinship, and moral obligation. People prized friendship as a virtue, but friendship was also treacherous territory filled with potential rivalries and betrayal. It was assumed that friendship was political—you helped your friends and you hurt your enemies.
Even in the ancient world, however, friendship between children was a carefree state uncomplicated by worldly realities. Although most ancient philosophers did not consider children capable of deep friendship, since they lacked virtues like wisdom and judgment, others, like Plutarch, noticed that children possessed something called “first friendship,” a quality endued to them by “Nature.” This “brotherly love” was a desirous trait, but however noticeable it was in children, it appeared lost to most adults.4
“Truly I tell you,” said Jesus, “unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3). Perhaps we could render his words afresh: “Truly I say to you, unless you return to first friendship—the way of trusting love and playfulness—you won’t know anything about the life God promises.” Apparently, Jesus sees friendship in childhood as something to aspire to, not look down upon. We may shake our heads in Calvinist disagreement or argue against such notions with modern psychological maturity, knowing full well that the stark realities of original sin or the theories spun by Freud better express the selfishness and brutality of childhood. Jesus, however, goes on to say that if you inhibit the natural propensity of children toward friendship with him, “it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matt. 18:6).
And therein is the problem of assigning friendship to children: everybody grows up. There are stumbling blocks aplenty. Friendship gets cast aside in favor of more important tasks, to be recovered only in our leisure time if at all. Meanwhile, the picture from Sunday school hangs in the clouded corners of memory. And Jesus’s welcome of children points us toward the friendship for which we were created, even as we mourn that we do not know how to get back there. But Jesus is still waiting on the playground, wanting to be our friend.
“You Are My Friends”
In August 2019, at the beginning of the school year in the United States, a photo showing two little boys holding hands went viral. Conner, an autistic boy entering the second grade, was going to school alone for the first time. Although the bus trip went well, when he arrived at the school, he froze with fear and started to cry; he hid in a corner, unable to walk into the building. Christian, another boy, saw Conner and went to comfort him. Then he took Conner by the hand and led him inside the building. “He found me and held my hand, and I got happy tears,” Conner later told a reporter when asked about Christian. “He was kind to me. I was in the first day of school, and I started crying. Then he helped me, and I was happy.” Conner’s mother said, “Christian is Conner’s first real friend.” And Christian’s mother explained, “They have an inseparable bond.”5
Like millions of others who saw the photograph and read this story, I felt verklempt, unable to hold back small tears of joy. I also laughed—because who would believe it without a picture? A white boy named Conner huddled in a corner, a Black boy named Christian—Christian!—reaching out to help him. It was an updated American parable, a rewrite of The Pilgrim’s Progress for an age of racial anxiety and political division. As I looked at the photograph, it seemed an icon for these days, a Jesus tenderly leading a frightened boy toward a new world. “This is my commandment,” said Jesus, “that you love one another as I have loved you. . . . You are my friends if you do what I command you” (John 15:12–14).
I am not sure if I ever knew what to make of those words of Jesus: “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” It all sounded so conditional. What kind of friendship was that? The story of Conner and Christian clarified it, though. Friendship is contingent on love—real love: compassion, empathy, reaching out, going beyond what we imagine is possible. That is the command: love. And if we reach out in love, friendship is the result, even friendship with God. Friendship is mutual, a hand extended and another reaching back.
When I think of friendship with Jesus, I imagine that hand extended. It happens in different ways, of course. Sometimes, the hand is part of an ancient story, the hand of Jesus outstretched to embrace little children or to invite us to follow him. But more often it is the hand of another person. When I feel afraid, huddled in a corner, unable to move forward, it is the hand that reaches out to comfort me, remind me that I am not alone, or guide me toward the next step on my journey. St. Teresa of Ávila once said, “God has no hands but yours. . . . Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.” Sometimes, I am the one who needs the hand; at other times, mine is the hand that reaches. Friendship is an eternal circle, the ceaseless reaching toward one another that strengthens us and gives us joy.
“I do not call you servants,” Jesus said, “but I have called you friends.” Astonishing.
Imagine how Jesus’s close followers felt when they heard those words for the first time. Of course, he was their friend. They had been through so much together, years of wandering homeless in Israel, learning from and teaching each other, sharing meals and prayers. They had come to suspect their companion was something more than a regular friend—a great rabbi, a spiritual healer, a mystical prophet, the Son of God. That last one made no intellectual or doctrinal sense to them. They were Jews, and there was only one God. Yet this friend of theirs knew and loved God more intimately and more uniquely than they had ever imagined possible.
Jesus brought them to the very heart of God and then revealed that God’s heart longed for friendship. They had heard this story before—Abraham, Moses, and Miriam were friends of God, as were the prophets and seers of ancient times and the great heroes of Israel like Ruth and Naomi, Esther, and David and Jonathan. They were more than servants to God. God was their friend; and they were friends of God. Servanthood, although admirable, is the lesser thing. Friendship, the knowing, loving, and free and joyful giving to another, is the passionate desire of God.
And now Jesus is saying, “I have called you friends,” not just to special people of the past whose names were recorded in sacred memory, but to the ragged fishermen and curious women, sitting around him listening to his tales, trusting for the first time that the God of Israel had not forgotten them, souls broken under the weight of Roman oppression, suffering under imperial slavery. They were not slaves, not even servants. They were friends of Jesus, friends of God.
In that world, Caesar was a god. Everyone feared him. He had no friends. The Egyptians and Persians had gods. None of those gods were friends to regular people. They were to be satisfied, their wrath appeased. There were gods aplenty, all awaiting your servile sacrifices and terrified loyalty, cold and isolated and distant in their marble and gold temples. The gods demanded so much of you, craving blood to prove obeisance, even your own if and when the whim suggested itself.
Jesus calls us friends. God reaches toward us, not as a fearsome master or judge, but a friend, beckoning us to reach back. Memories of Eden flood the heart, that ancient longing for friendship with God. The exile is ended, the embrace endures. Once, we were created by that hand that reached to dust and rib; now that same hand joins ours again and again, the clasp of the unfailing friend.
We might not stop to think about what makes for a friend, but one professor says close friendship is made up of three simple things: “Somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy.”6 Children, of course, know the ease of this, and it underscores how important freedom is in the exchange: God freely reaches, and we freely reach back. The great Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer likened friendship to wildflowers:
No one has planted, no one watered it;
it grows, defenseless in freedom,
and in cheerful confidence
that no one will grudge it
life
under the broad sky.7
Adults make friendship hard, almost as if it is a burden on our time, taking our attention away from more pressing matters. We have forgotten the effortless and winsome aspects of friendship, how the best of friends often show up when least expected. Perhaps we have become too cultivated in modern life. Researchers have found that most Americans have only two friends they consider “confidantes,” a number that has fallen from three friends in the mid-1980s.8 Younger people tend to have more friends than older adults. By midlife, however, Americans often consider friendship optional, especially when raising families and pursuing careers. For older adults, making friends is difficult, as issues such as living alone and health concerns limit opportunities for new connections. One theologian, who writes powerfully about friendship, notes, “Authentic friendship is notoriously different [from relationships we can control or manipulate] and inescapably risky.”9
In an age of risks, the last thing most of us think we need is yet another uncertainty, no matter the potential rewards. The social, technological, and economic pressures of contemporary life have made us all Conner—we might have been brave enough to get on the bus, but when we arrive at school, we fear that someone will hurt us, we will not be accepted, or we cannot walk through the door into an unknowable future. Overcoming one risk opens up more risks. And, revealing my inner Conner for a moment, the honest truth is that I just want to go home.
The picture of Christian taking Conner’s hand is, of course, an image of love. But it is also an image of risk. Clearly it was a risk for Conner, in view of whatever he imagined awaited him in that scary school building. But Christian risked as well. He did not know how Conner might respond. Would Conner use a racial slur against him, hit him, or reject his hand? But Christian went ahead anyway, regardless of the consequences, in freedom and (what Bonhoeffer called) “cheerful confidence” that love—uncultivated, uncalculated—was greater than the risk. “True friendships are not,” muses one author, “relationships we control but adventures we enter into.”10 If friendship is risky, then it is the risk of a shared journey. Better to go together than alone.
The story of the New Testament is that the risk of friendship is the risk that frees us from fear and reshapes our lives—it is better to go together than to go alone. Jesus befriends us, opening our hearts to genuine love and the capacity to forgive each other, welcome all, and act justly in the world. Friendship with Jesus may begin on the playground, in the Sunday school class, while wandering in the woods, or pretty much anywhere, but it becomes an adventure, a journey, as the relationship grows and changes over a lifetime. That is what friendship is, the field where the wildflowers grow, where the unpredictable, beautiful things of being human come forth from the soil, where we flourish with others.
Friendship makes us different from the person we would be if we were alone, and, I daresay, it makes Jesus different as well, for friendship is mutuality, shared vision, and affection. Some versions of Christianity insist that Jesus is immutable, but if Jesus invites us into friendship, how can that be? As Jesus risks with outstretched hand toward a world of potential friends, does not every hand that is returned—in some way—transform Jesus as well? It is not friendship if it is not mutual: no sharing, no friendship.
Conner and Christian both changed, something impossible without mutual risk and mutual response. It is just that simple. When Jesus extends the hand of friendship and we reach back, everything changes with the clasp. And that is the stunning, mind-bending, soul-expanding truth of the words that thunder beyond an ancient page toward every trembling “Conner” moment of our lives: I have called you friends.
Then comes the other surprise. Jesus tells us to go be the other boy at school; we are to be Christian: “Go and bear fruit, fruit that will last. . . . I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another” (John 15:16–17). Jesus befriends us so we can befriend others. That is the odd thing about friendship. Sometimes we are Conner, but we always aspire to be Christian, who takes the risk, knowing that Jesus risked when reaching toward us.
Friends to Each Other
There is a thread that runs through Western philosophy and theology that defines friendship as a potentially exclusive and selfish relationship. In ancient thought, friendship was needed to make oneself a better person; it ennobled virtue and was necessary for the good life. While commentators praised friendship as a glorious thing, many also fretted that friendship is preferential and private (not to mention the continued undercurrent of homophobic concern about the lines being crossed from male friendship to erotic love). We choose our friends because we like them, feel kinship toward them, and perhaps even perceive their similarity to us. The Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard actually scorned friendship on these grounds as morally inadequate and even antithetical to Christianity. “Friendship belongs to paganism,” he wrote.11
Although Kierkegaard was partial to theological extremes, it is true that nearly everything written about friendship in Western history has been written by men and maintains certain misunderstandings based in hierarchy and privilege. I have wondered if this line of thinking inspires some contemporary criticism of Jesus as friend, an insult often directed at those deemed theologically immature, “childish,” or, more overtly, “feminine.”
But there is another thread in the history of Western spirituality that weaves friendship into practices of justice and equality. A few years ago, I discovered—much to my surprise—that my first ancestors to come to America were Quakers. Although we mostly think of that tradition through old-fashioned stereotypes, “Quakers” is the nickname for the Society of Friends, and that group, founded in the mid-1600s, has never been quaint. Quakers believed that every human being was filled with the “inner light,” or the presence of God. Because of this, there was no need for clergy or even a church. The Friends met to encourage one another to listen to and experience the light. As a result, they formed distinctively egalitarian communities, with shared responsibilities between men and women, and rejected class divisions. They called themselves “Friends of the Truth” or “Friends of the Light.” They were friends of God and to one another.
The idea that Quakers were quaint came from their practice of addressing people as “thou” or “thee,” words we consider old-fashioned today. However, “thou” and “thee” were once the familiar forms of address, used for intimates and friends in place of the more formal “you.” Thus, when a Quaker walked down a road in England, crossed paths with the local squire, and addressed his higher-ranking neighbor as “thou” instead of the more formal, expected “you,” it was akin to calling a member of the local nobility “mate” or “buddy,” a greeting to which the Quakers’ lordly superiors did not take kindly.
Such practices of friendship—based on the belief that since we are friends of God, we are all friends of one another—were deemed radical, heretical, and a threat to the good order of society. Thus, the Quakers found themselves at odds with authorities, sentenced to prison, and exiled for the crime of being friends. As the movement spread, Friends advocated for all sorts of social justice causes, including abolition and women’s rights. It all seemed pretty obvious to them: friends do not let friends be held in slavery. Friendship expanded naturally from the most profound inner experiences to the world of social relations and politics, as friendship with God meant a more just, loving, and egalitarian society.
Friendship is not just for friends. Friendship is for the good of the world.
The radical, inclusive friendship of God shows up in the New Testament, where Jesus is accused of being a friend of sinners and tax collectors (Luke 7:34), as many of his closest associates—his friends—were outcasts and marginal people. It was an odd group of friends, one that went well beyond convention and included “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (Luke 14:13). Perhaps the simplest thing to understand in the entire New Testament is that Jesus invites his friends to dinner—all of them, respectable and not. The earliest followers of Jesus gathered at table, making the meal or feast the focus for the new community, causing one scholar to refer to the whole Jesus movement as “a banquet of unusual friends,” men and women together, who turned the social order of table relations on its head.12 Unlike the vision of heroic “virtue” friendship of the ancient world, a relationship between individual men seeking valor and the good life, Jesus’s friendship is known in community, a wide-open invitation to mutual love, care, and sharing. “It is not a friendship of one or two,” proclaimed a preacher more than a century ago, “but of many.”13
Friends do things together. When we are children, we play. As we grow up, we might share a hobby or interest. When we are adults, we may find ourselves working side by side for a cause or at a protest march. If a friend is in trouble, we do whatever we can to help. But something else happens as well. Instead of just rejoicing in the private relations between friends, we turn outward and invite others to come along. We do not just please ourselves or work to serve others, we invite them to the table, to sit and enjoy the companionship of all. We give up false notions of friendship—notions of exclusivity and preference—and instead set a table where everyone is welcome, where strangers become friends, and where every person is an honored guest.
But what about Jesus’s comment: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13)? For far too long, Christians have interpreted this to mean that we have to die for our friends. Of course, there are rare moments when a friend might save another’s life by putting their own self in danger—like a hostage situation, pushing a friend out of oncoming traffic, or rushing into a burning house. More typically, we “lay down” other things in friendship, surrendering isolation, burdens, despair, and self-delusion. We lay down the lives we had when we accept the invitation to Jesus’s dinner party. There, Jesus does not assign new arrivals to the dishwashing crew or the group wiping down the tables. Instead, as soon as we enter the banquet hall, he waves at us, calling out, “Friend, move up higher!” and points to a place marked by name (Luke 14:10).
Friends do not just work together to make a better world; even the best of such friendships are too often based in a common self-interested vision. Jesus as friend does not offer a plan; instead, he extends a hand that guides us into a new reality. Here friendship itself is the embodiment of a more just and loving world. Like Christian and Conner on the school playground. Like many saints and wise ones throughout history.
This is what Howard Thurman, the African American mystic and activist, knew in 1935 when he made a “pilgrimage of friendship” to India to meet Gandhi. He traveled halfway around the planet to make friends with the great teacher of nonviolence, intuiting that sitting together, listening, and learning could change the world. Gandhi explained that the soul force of nonviolence was beneath and through all things, and this force, and this force alone, could break through the unjust structures of racism, poverty, and class and allow broken humanity to find true oneness. The joining of friends unleashed the nonviolent energy present throughout the cosmos, and that would bring forth genuine freedom and equality for all in beloved community. The friendship of two changes little; the friendship of many changes everything.14
I have called you friends.
* * *
Sometimes the first thing is the most important thing, in this case, the Sunday school lesson long ago. “Jesus kept on telling us we should try to be like children,” said Dorothy Day shortly before she passed away, “be more open to life, curious about it, trusting of it; and be less cynical and skeptical and full of ourselves, as we so often are when we get older.”15 Know that Jesus is your friend. Be a friend.
A couple years ago, Rev. Dr. Eric Elnes, a friend of mine, preached a sermon series on friendship.16 Eric holds a PhD in Old Testament and is pastor of a well-educated, culturally sophisticated congregation. At the end of the first sermon, he invited the church into a simple practice to imagine themselves as friends of God:
If you want to experience a fraction of God’s love for you, I have a suggestion for the next time you approach God in prayer. I invite you to imagine that your very best friend is before you—someone who is no less loving or gracious, or endearing, or wise than your very best friends on earth. If you will treat God like your very best friend, you will eventually come to know the God whom Jesus and Abraham knew as Friend. This is a promise I make to you. More importantly, it is a promise the Scriptures make.
We forget what was promised, what we knew to be true before we knew anything else. We have to be reminded when we grow up. All that cynicism and skepticism—those are easier to believe than the promise. I have to remind myself of Miss Jean, of walking and talking with Jesus in the woods. It is hard to remember the woods.
We do, of course, grow up. And the world changes. One day, in the spring after I turned five, a bulldozer arrived and mowed down all the trees across the street. A small ranch house arose in place of the woods. My arboreal playground disappeared overnight, but a new family moved in. Their daughter became a classmate when we started school—and my friend.