CHRIST OUR LOVING FRIEND

I John5:1-6; John 15:9-17

6th Sunday of Easter, May 5, 2024

Rev. Dr. Ritva  H. Williams

Welcome to episode 3 of “who is the Risen Christ for us today?” So far we have learned that Christ is the Good Shepherd and the True Vine. As the Good Shepherd, Christ lays down their life in order to lead, guide and protect us, the sheep. As the True Vine, Christ is the source and conduit that nourishes us — the branches — with God’s love, thereby empowering us to bear fruit in the form of love for one another. This morning we meet Christ as our Loving Friend. 

Our Gospel reading begins with Jesus declaring, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” (John 15:9). That sums up last Sunday’s teaching: Christ loves us the same way God loves Jesus, and invites us to make ourselves at home in their love. It is the very  heart of the good news: you are God’s beloved in whom God delights. God’s love is given without condition, but it has consequences. The purpose of God’s love is to change us, to heal our brokenness, and empower us to love one another. 

Jesus goes on saying, there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:10). Our first reaction to this statement might be something like: Thank you Jesus! Friends are people I know and trust and like to hang out with on a regular basis. Friends are buddies and pals. (vocabulary.com). Loving my friends, even laying down my life for them is a lot easier than laying down my life for the noisy, messy, nosy next door neighbors. I don’t like them much, and don’t want to hang out with them.

Hmmm. Remember, how over the last two week, we’ve learned that Christ the Good Shepherd willingly laid down their life for the sheep, including sheep who are not part of this particular flock, this particular tribe. And we’ve heard how the early church interpreted laying down one’s life as a generous sharing of one’s time, energy and resources for neighbors in need. 

The point is that“we choose our friends because we like them, feel kinship toward them, and perhaps even perceive their similarity to us.” Jesus has a totally different set of criteria for deciding who is a friend. 

Jesus declares to his disciples, ancient and modern, using the plural form of you, “You all are my friends,” “I have called all of you my friends,” “You all did not choose me but I chose all of you.” Those earliest disciples were a motley crew of Middle Eastern fishers, tax collectors, beggars, slaves, slave managers, learned Pharisees, cast off members of priestly families, men and women of all sorts. Christ includes us among their friends even though we have hardly anything at all in common with the first disciples. Yet Christ has chosen all of us and calls all of us friends. What now?

Diana Butler Bass writes in her book Freeing Jesus:

Although … nearly everything written about friendship in Western history has been written by men and maintains certain misunderstandings based in hierarchy and privilege … there is another thread in the history of Western spirituality that weaves friendship into practices of justice and equality (p. 20)

She goes on to describe the beliefs and practices of the Quakers whose real name is the Society of Friends. They believe that since we have all been chosen to be Christ's friends, we are all friends of one another. That conviction led Quakers to form distinctively egalitarian communities, with shared responsibilities between men and women, and rejected class distinctions. Quakers advocated for all sorts of social justice causes, including abolition and women’s rights. It all seemed pretty obvious to them: friends don’t let friends be held in slavery. … Friendship is not just for friends. Friendship is for the good of the world. (pp. 20-21).

The friendship that is good for the world is the kind of friendship that lays down one’s life for others by paying attention to the other and forgetting oneself long enough to understand the other with compassion. Preaching Professor Gennifer Benjamin Brooks, suggests we consider what it would take:

… to set aside all that one believes about others, to set aside the prejudices that prevent or stifle friendship, in order to join others in being truly the Body of Christ? What would it take to set aside even for a moment the familiar and the cherished, whether simply beliefs or practices, in order to stand in for another, especially someone different, perhaps even someone on the margins? That might well be a form of laying down one’s life that a congregation that has been encouraged to embrace true diversity might be open to hearing or even doing.(Commentary on John 15:9-17, May 9 2021, at workingpreacher.org)

Commenting on opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement, Professor Brooks explains:

as a diverse community under Christ [where] all are connected to the one source all [do] people matter equally. But in a society where Black lives are devalued … [and] dehumanized as though they do not also contain the same Imago Dei [image of God] as all other human beings, it is not enough to say that all lives matter. It becomes imperative that the church acknowledge that love of neighbor must be extended equally to those of a dark hue in a way that epitomizes one’s life laid down for one’s friends. 

What stereotypes and prejudices have we worked to set aside — to lay down — in order to embrace and celebrate LGBTQIA2+ persons as beloved children of God, and as our friends? In this month of May, we asked to expand our inclusivity by asking ourselves: what would it look like to lay down our lives for our siblings dealing with mental health issues, for our Asian American and Pacific Islander neighbors. What beliefs and practices stand in the way of celebrating the first nations people who lived on these lands before we did? What prejudices prevent us from caring about all the murdered and missing indigenous women and girls? 

In today’s Gospel reading Jesus explains, “I have said these things in order that my joy may be in you, and in order that your joy may be complete. This is my command that you may love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:11-12). We have heard these words before. Just after Jesus finished washing the disciples’ feet, he give them the new commandment: Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, whenever you have love for one another (John 13:34-35). 

Everything that Jesus has said and done, beginning with washing the feet of his disciples, has been for the purpose of demonstrating how much God loves them, and how to love one another as Christ loves them. That entire Last Supper was a lesson in how to be friends who lay down their lives by setting aside power and privilege in order to make the world better for all of God’s children.

Pastor Steve Garnaas-Holmes puts it well when he writes (unfoldinglight.org): 

Jesus will have no hierarchies, no separations or divisions, not even between us and him.
“Call no one good but God.”
There are no greater and lesser, no servants and masters, no insiders and outsiders.
Not even believers and unbelievers.
Only friends, peers, siblings, companions.
Every stranger is a sibling.
Every person you meet is a friend for whom you would lay down your life.
There is no “them.” There is only us.
In the love of Christ, befriend this world and everyone in it;
you will never be alone.

Amen. Amen. Let it be so.