Rediscovering friendship [part 1]

It’s at the heart of marriage. It’s the joy of singleness. It’s vital to gospel ministry. It’s key to cross-cultural encounter.

Friendship

Peel away the superficial modern meanings of friendship and dig down into the ancient sources and you find something very rich and strong. Reading Augustine’s Confessions I am struck by how hugely important (for good or ill) his friends were in his life. He lived with them and ate with them. He loved them deeply. Their life choices – work, travel, marriage, ethics, philosophy – were each other’s business. In many ways their friendships were similar to the covenanted friendship of David and Jonathan (1 Sam. 18:1-4 cf. Ruth 1:16) – intensely loyal, devoted, knit together. In one of his most extreme passages, Augustine speaks of his anguish after the death of his friend:

“I, who had been like another self to him. It was well said that a friend is half one’s own soul. I felt that my soul and his had been but one soul in two bodies, and I shrank from life with loathing because I could not bear to be only half alive; and perhaps I was so afraid of death because I did not want the whole of him to die, whom I had loved so dearly.” (Augustine, Confessions 4.6.11 trans. Maria Boulding)

As far back as Moses we find the concept of ‘the friend [Hebrew: rea] who is as your own soul’ (Deut. 13:6). There may well be love here (the Greek LXX translates rea with philos – ‘loved one’ – the NT word for friend) but the key issue in the biblical sources is loyalty, allegiance and common cause. When warriors come to David, defecting from King Saul, David says to them, in words reminiscent of his covenant with Jonathan, “If you have come to me in friendship to help me, my heart will be joined to you.” (1 Chron. 12:17). In the ancient world, friendship is a strong compact of loyalty (2 Sam. 16:17; Prov. 18:24; 27:10) and common cause (Luke 23:12).

So when Jesus has table fellowship with the disreputable and is accused of being a ‘friend’ of tax collectors and sinners (Matt. 11:19) it is a serious accusation – that he has yoked himself to those who are ungodly (which of course he wonderfully has, just not in the accommodating, corrupting way that the Pharisees assume).

There are three verses of John’s Gospel which a friend (appropriately) pointed me to recently which comprise perhaps the most surprising and striking passage on friendship of all:

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. (John 15:13-15)

1. You might expect the greatest love to be love for strangers or enemies, and there is a sense in which this is true (Rom. 5:8-10) but the point here seems to be that the deepest, richest, strongest, highest love is other-person-centred, sacrificial, loyal-to-death, friend-love. Jesus did not lay down his life in a disinterested, dispassionate way for nameless strangers but for his beloved friends.
2. To our modern ears the ideas of friendship and command-obedience seem opposite. As my friend said to me when he pointed me towards this passage, “We seem to be dealing with something quite different to our modern idea of friendship.” This is friendship in the sense that Abraham was a friend of God (2 Chron. 20:7), loved by God, obedient, loyal. And there is some asymmetry here. “Mutual, reciprocal friendship of the modern variety is not in view” (Carson). As with marriage, we find that extremely deep, close, loving relationship and submission can sit together.
3. Again as D. A. Carson comments, the difference between servant and friend according to Jesus is not the presence or absence of submission but rather the issue of revelation. The friend is the one who has been let in on the plans. It’s similar to the idea of common cause – it’s entering the inner circle, given access to command ops, sitting in the Situation Room, shown the battle strategy. Or to use a more familial analogy (which is perhaps more appropriate to Jesus’ language here) friendship is being welcomed into the innermost part of the home and hearing the heart and plans and wisdom of the patriarch communicated through the firstborn son.

All this suggests that friendship in the ancient world was a very serious, strong thing. It is not the till-death-do-us-part one-flesh union of marriage but it is a very weighty loyalty. It could therefore, as Augustine later realised, be a very dangerous, idolatrous thing when it becomes an inward-looking end in itself, or is put above allegiance to Christ, or is a substitute to friendship with God or is united in pursuit of an ungodly cause. The same could be said of marriage or family relationships (Luke 14:26; Acts 5:1-2).

But at its best friendship, like marriage, points beyond itself to the greatest love-bond of all – the Son who lays down his life for his friends, reveals the Father to his friends, calls his friends to walk together in mission with him, yoked in obedience to him.