You’re sitting with a friend, and suddenly your friend says, “Look. I need to tell you something but please promise me you won’t be mad.”
When your friend says, “promise you won’t be mad,” you know that friend is about to tell you something that is guaranteed to make you mad, right?
Same situation here. Jesus’ friends say, “promise you will do for us whatever we ask of you,” because they are about to ask something from him that is really too much to ask.
But Jesus plays along. “What do you want,” he asks them. I imagine him grinning at this moment. They say to him, “Give us the best seats in your glory. The throne at your right hand and the throne at your left hand. Please, thank you.”
Listen, this is a weird thing for them to ask. Even for these guys who are predisposed to saying weird and inappropriate things, this ranks up there with the weirdest. Weird, because of what they have just heard Jesus say.
This happened while they were on the road, right after the exchange with the rich young ruler. Right after Jesus told the rich man that he would need to sell all his possessions. Right after he told his disciples about all the things that would happen to him – not nice things. He would be handed over to the chief priests, who would condemn him to death. He would be mocked and spit upon and flogged and finally killed.
Somehow, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, they found this to be a fitting time to say, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Really? Where are their heads at? Quite possibly, they are desperately seeking something to make them forget.
Because, as Peter said to Jesus after the conversation about riches and heaven, they have staked everything on him. Each of them has left everything and everyone to follow him. And they are beginning to see where that might lead. They are beginning to see that if Jesus is the one who will suffer and die then they, too, might be the ones who suffer and die for his sake. This teacher, this friend, is showing them things they did not really want to know – about himself; about themselves.
There is a novel by the Czech writer Milan Kundera, called Identity, in which one of the characters tells us he believes that friendship is for the sole purpose of knowing who we are. Friends are like a mirror, he says, and we ask only that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it. And this makes me wonder: What happens when the friend who polishes the mirror forces us to see something about ourselves that we do not care to see?
“I have called you friends,” Jesus said, “because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” All of it.
The topic today is friendship because this is a dimension of our relationship with Jesus. Throughout the time they spent together, Jesus had different kinds of relationships with his disciples. He was their teacher, he was their healer, he was their guide. But then he lifted their relationship up to a higher level: friend.
A friendship is a relationship between equals. Friends may not be equal in every sense, but the basis of the friendship is the acceptance that one does not “lord it over” the other. One does not patronize the other. Friends do not jockey for position and undercut one another. Between friends there is honesty and acceptance and care.
Jesus says to them, “I have called you friends because I have told you everything.” And what is not said but surely implied is that he has told them everything because they will need to know it, because they will need to carry on without him in a short period of time, continuing his work of healing and teaching and leading. What has not been said but maybe should be said is that he tells them everything, the truth, with the expectation that they will be able to handle it.
But friendship is not only honest, it is patient, and surely Jesus knew that it would take his friends some time for them to arrive at acceptance. Some of the things he said they would get right away. Some of it they would push back against because it was harder to accept. And some of the things he said they would try to convince themselves were just the opposite of what he meant to say, and they would respond with non sequiturs, like special requests about the seating arrangements in his throne room. And then, when that was not enough to diffuse the tension they felt, they would bicker with one another about who asked first and who had priority. And it is clear that Jesus still has much to teach his friends.
I spoke to you last week about forgiveness being a part of our identity in Christ. That we are, first and foremost, forgiven by God for everything in our lives that weighs us down and binds us up. And, as ones who are forgiven, we are also called to be ones who extend forgiveness to others.
I think we all know that forgiveness is also an essential element of friendship. Without forgiveness I don’t know how a friendship can survive. Resentment and grudges stand in the way, blocking the flow of love from one friend to another. If you have been hurt by a friend, only forgiveness will save the friendship. And very often, getting to forgiveness requires a level of honesty we have not been accustomed to practicing. Perhaps even the level that Jesus talks about – I call you friend because I tell you everything. Including, I tell you where my soft spots are, my vulnerabilities, because I want to trust you to honor them, be tender about them. I trust you to treat me in the way you would also want to be treated.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. This is what Jesus said to his friends, his disciples. He was certainly foreshadowing his death, but it strikes me that his words may suggest something else as well. To lay down your life for your friend may be to open yourself up. To let that friend see you and know you for who you are. To lay down your life can happen when you are simply and purely yourself, the person God made you to be.
And, yes, that is actually risky. We take a risk when we take off our masks, when we stop pretending to be whatever we think the world will value but instead choose to just be what we are deep inside. We take the risk of disappointing others or being scorned by others. We take the risk of losing a friend, perhaps, a friend who no longer likes the mirror we hold up for them.
But the greater risk is hiding yourself, keeping yourself locked up in a dark closet for fear of what others might see, or maybe what you might see. There is no risk-free life.
But even more significant than the risks are the rewards, and in friendship there are so many. There is the reward of feeling the lightness that comes when we unburden ourselves from deceit and judgment. There is the reward of the comfort we find when we share ourselves with a friend and find a kinship. C.S. Lewis once said that a true friendship is born when one person says to the other, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”
I thought I was the only one, but now I know that I am not. When we embrace friendship, we know that we are not alone in our fear or our confusion or our doubts. And there is so much more good we can do in the world when we do it with friends. We are a force of nature.
This is what God has made us to be – friends, in the truest sense of the word. It is our identity in Christ Jesus, to be his friend, and to share that friendship with others, even the most unlikely people.
I call you my friends. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Picture: ChurchArt.Com
