In the musical, My Fair Lady, there is a young man who is hopelessly in love with Eliza Doolittle. He is trying to profess his love to her, then Eliza suddenly interrupts him, saying she is so sick of words, words, words. She says, “If you’re in love, show me!” Because words will only go so far in communicating something as big as love.
In the Gospel of John, God’s love is a clear thread running through it – and the gospel only has words to show us this. Jesus uses an awful lot of words with his disciples to show them who he is and what kind of relationship he wants to have with them. In John’s gospel we have the “I am” passages, where Jesus uses words to show his disciples who he is for them. And in recent weeks we have dwelled on some of these. Such as I am the good shepherd, and I am the true vine.
Not to say that he is, literally, a shepherd – or a grapevine.
When all you have are words, you try to use those words to spark imaginations. Words become images which can become truths that live inside of the listener. Sometimes it doesn’t work out well. You may remember the Pharisee, Nicodemus, who couldn’t quite grasp the images Jesus tried to convey to him about being born of the Spirit. But others who heard Jesus were better at catching the meaning – such as the Samaritan woman at the well, who easily flowed right along with Jesus when he said to her, I give you living water. She said, I’ll take it.
In the words we hear today from Chapter 15, the image is one that you might understand quite well: friends. We have friends. We know what they are. But I must confess that it doesn’t seem simple to me.
When I hear Jesus call me his friend, I am bowled over…staggered. This seems like a remarkable thing. In some ways it seems like too little – remember that guy, or girl, who said to you, “I just want to be your friend.” Yet, in other ways, it seems like too much, an impossibly intimate thing to have with the Son of God.
One year some college students I worked with created a sermon about friendship, and they managed to articulate seven distinct levels of friendship. They drew a diagram that looked like a bullseye target. It was the seven circles of friendship, kind of like Dante’s nine circles of hell – only different. The weakest levels of friendship were on the outer rings and the deeper levels were nearer the center. It was surprisingly detailed – something, I think, only young people could create. Friendship is to young adults like snow is to the Inuit people: something so central to their existence they are acutely aware of all the nuances.
But even if you don’t have such a fine and variegated understanding of friendship, you probably would agree that there are a few different degrees, or kinds, of friendship.
Whatever Jesus means when he uses this word, it is clear that it’s not a word I can toss off casually or that I can afford to misunderstand. He tells me I am his friend, that he has chosen me for friendship. And I have to struggle with understanding just what that means.
What does it mean to call someone “friend?”
As I pondered the question this week, I realized I couldn’t do it on my own. I would have to turn to an authoritative source, and so I did. Facebook, that strange realm that invented a whole new meaning for the word “friend.” I asked my Facebook community what makes someone a good friend.
I got answers from a dozen people and found some consensus about what we value in a friend. We are looking for someone who is trustworthy, someone with whom we feel comfortable enough to be ourselves, someone who listens to us. We don’t want to be judged by our friends, but we do want them to be honest with us. Maybe. We want them to care for us, to want the best for us. We want them to love us, unconditionally.
One person said something that I found particularly helpful. That her friends tell her they love her, even when they know she is wrong. But they also tell her that she was in the wrong.
As I thought about it a little more, it occurred to me that good friends can make us better people, because when we are committed to a good friendship, we are practicing some of the things that make us more loving, more generous, more joyful people.
In this series on resurrection stories, we have been spending some time thinking about what it means to have a relationship with a resurrected Savior, and what it means for us to be resurrected people. We began with a few of the stories in the gospels about that very first day when Jesus rose from the grave. The ways he showed up for his first disciples share some common ground with the ways we might see him show up in our lives.
The message, essentially, is that we can enjoy the presence of Jesus with us just as the first disciples did because it is the role of the church to let Jesus live in us and through us. And we are most clearly able to see the resurrected Jesus when we are letting his light shine through us for the benefit of one another. The resurrected life of Jesus is most vivid when it is being shined outwardly, for the benefit of the world.
To be a resurrected people is to be a friend to the people God has placed in our lives.
I have used a lot of words over these past several weeks in my efforts to convey the ideas of resurrection life. But words are not enough and never will be enough. Eventually, all the words must point to something beyond themselves. As Eliza said, Show me! And the message of all the gospels is that Jesus did, indeed, show us. He said,
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. And then he showed us.
He also said,
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Now it’s on us to show him.
This is what Jesus is waiting to see, whether we will love one another as he loves us.
You may still be on the fence about whether you are prepared to lay down your life for a friend, even for a friend in the innermost circle of friendship. No one mentioned that particular quality in response to my Facebook query.
It’s okay, I think we all understand the ambivalence one might feel about laying down your life for anyone. But perhaps we can begin with a few small steps; with a willingness to lay down our agendas…to lay down our prejudices…to lay down our infernal busyness for a friend in need. We might be better friends if we could lay down these things. And with more people practicing real, authentic, and meaningful friendship, the world would be a better place.
Brothers and sisters, we are living in a post-resurrection world. Because Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead, the world is a different place than what it was before. You and I know this. But someone outside the church, someone new to the church might say, “Show me!”
And that is a fair request to make. It will be up to us to show them, with the evidence of our lives.
Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash
