Best Friend
John
14: 15-21 (NRSV)
”If
you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you
another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot
receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he
abides with you, and he will be in you.
”I
will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer
see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that
I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are
those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will
love them and reveal myself to them.”
What makes a good friend?
That was the question on my
mind this week while I was preparing this message.
What makes a good friend?
I thought of the way I tend
to use that word, “friend”, and the people I’m talking about when I use that
word. I came up with a little list off the top of my head of qualities that
describe a “friend”:
·
Someone you share common interests with
·
Someone you spend a lot of time with
·
Someone you like
·
Someone you see as your peer
·
Someone you trust
·
Someone you want to get in touch with when
something important happens in your life—good or bad—and someone you hope would
do the same for you
·
Someone you aren’t quick to give up on if you
get in a fight, or things aren’t going well, or they suddenly aren’t much fun
to be around—and, again, someone you hope would do the same for you
·
Someone you admire; someone you would praise,
and call a good person, and, again, who would do the same for you
But even though I thought I
came up with a pretty good list, I didn’t want to depend just on my own
understanding of “friend” to answer this question. I turned to a lot of
different places for answers to that question. The first source of wisdom I
turned to on this topic is to someone who I genuinely think is the most
brilliant of all modern philosophers—Winnie the Pooh. Winnie the Pooh—or,
rather, his author, A.A. Milne—said: ”A day without a friend is like a pot
without a single drop of honey left inside.”[i]
Good old Pooh, always
thinking of his tummy. Perhaps the more adult way to put that would be to say
that a good friend adds a much-needed element of sweetness to your life—so much
so that you simply wouldn’t want to live without such a person.
But a good friend does a lot
more for you than just make your day sweeter. A good friend will take care of
you. A good friend will put your best interests first—even when it’s not fun,
and even when that friend has to give something up for you to be happy and
provided for. Nineteenth Century author Jane Austen put this best in her novel Northanger Abbey—“There is nothing I
would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving
people by halves, it is not my nature.”[ii]
But real, long-lasting
friendship runs deeper still. You might have shared interests, or a similar
background, or generally good feelings about any number of people in this
world. And if you’re a charitable sort, you might find yourself sacrificing
your own happiness in favor of people you don’t even know, and maybe never
will.
A good friend does much more
than those things for you. A very good friend, the kind that sticks around for
the long-haul, shares a sacred piece of this journey of life with you. A very
good friend becomes part of you. A very good friend becomes like your other
half. Perhaps the philosopher Aristotle said it best when he said that a friend
was “a single soul dwelling in two bodies.”[iii]
A single soul dwelling in
two bodies. Imagine that kind of love. That kind of deeply-felt, unshakeable,
unconditional love is rare. I dare say that even if you consider yourself to be
a popular, likeable, sociable person, there aren’t too many people around you
who are such a good friend that you would say a piece of your own soul lives
within them. We give a lot to other people, especially when we live a Christian
life. We give of our time, our talents, our prayers, our resources, our hopes,
our aspirations, and tremendous amounts of our love. And we give of those things
freely. But who do we give our souls
to? Certainly not to just any friend. Not even a good friend is worthy of such
a treasured part of you. Only a closest friend, only your best friend, will
probably ever know that much of you.
Your best friend. Our culture’s
cheapened that word, “friend”, quite a bit. We’ve devalued real friendship as
much as we’ve devalued any of our human relationships—it’s easy to cheapen
something that you can’t put a price tag on. It’s easy to cheapen something
that isn’t always tangible, that you can’t put your finger on and say, “there,
that’s it.” We can’t help it. We have five marvelous senses, and we were made
to use them. Tangible, concrete things make the most sense to us, and we tend
to like those things best.
But, in spite of how we were
made, and in spite of what we’ve been taught, there’s a bigger part of all of
us that knows that we don’t want to be alone. Ever since Adam asked God to make
him a companion to share the Garden of Eden with, we’ve known that we shouldn’t
spend life alone. Seeking the company of others is a beautiful part of what
makes us human. And this is where friendship comes from—that incredible piece
of us that always wants to reach out to those around us. That piece of us that
wants community, and fellowship.
It’s innately human. Jesus,
fully human, experienced this exact same instinct his whole time on this earth.
You might think the Son of God, fully infused with the Divine, could have done
his job on his own. But he didn’t. That wasn’t what he wanted, and wasn’t what
he chose. The only time he chose to be alone in his ministry was immediately
after his baptism, when he spent forty days and nights fasting in the
wilderness. Immediately after he came back from that retreat, the first thing
he did was find companionship—twelve people to minister with him. Twelve people
to spend nearly all of his time with—twelve very good friends. And as his
ministry grew, so did his circle of friends, and Jesus welcomed that. Jesus
didn’t want to do his ministry without friends. He couldn’t. And today, two
thousand years later, neither can we.
Now, I spent a longer time
this week than I usually do setting up the “central point”, if you will, but
this week, I found something in our lectionary-appointed Gospel passage that really
intrigued me. This week, our lectionary has us continuing on in the last third
of John’s Gospel. By this time, Jesus has established and planted his ministry.
He’s making his way ever closer to Jerusalem, and now his priorities are
shifting. Because he has made so many friends, and because he has invited so
many eager people into discipleship and fellowship with him, he doesn’t have to
worry that his ministry is going anywhere—there’s plenty of people at work now,
ready to plant his love in every corner of the world. The only problem is that
they just don’t know it yet.
So Jesus needs to start
preparing all of his disciples—all of his friends—for the day when he won’t be
with them in the flesh anymore, and the day that they’ll need to go out on
their own and do his ministry. So like a very, very good friend, this week we
hear him giving words of comfort and reassurance to his disciples—you might not see me all the time, he
says, but you’ll never be alone. I’ll
never let that happen. And then Jesus starts preparing his disciples to
hear about something new. Something that we hear call the “third person of the
Trinity”, and something that we’ll hear all about in just a few more weeks on
Pentecost Sunday—Jesus starts telling his disciples about the Holy Spirit. But
Jesus knows that if he just says, “the
Holy Spirit is coming”, his disciples won’t understand. So instead he says,
don’t worry when you don’t see me around
all the time anymore. There’s going to be a new person keeping you company from
now on. In the new Revised Standard Version of this story—what I read to
you today, and what I nearly always read and preach from—Jesus calls the Holy
Spirit an “Advocate”. But, I have a contemporary, conversational paraphrase of
the Bible written by a man by the name of Eugene Peterson called The Message that I also turn to a lot
for a more modern insight into the Word. In his paraphrase of this morning’s
Gospel reading, Peterson doesn’t call the Holy Spirit an “Advocate”, but rather
a “Friend”.
A friend. I love this. I
especially love this because I think, out of all three persons of the Trinity,
it can be hardest to try to wrap your head around who the Holy Spirit is, and
what the Holy Spirit does in our world. This makes it easy.
We can do our ministry in
the world because we decided to be friends of Christ, and Christ
enthusiastically accepted us. And whenever it gets hard to minister in our
world—as it so often does—we have a Friend by our side. Someone who helps us.
Someone who encourages us. Someone who wants the best for us. Someone who
believes in our greatest potential. Someone who loves us. A force that spends
all of its time with us.
But, perhaps more than
anything, God our Creator sent us the Holy Spirit so that we would have someone
in our lives who really fits Aristotle’s definition of a friend—“a single soul
dwelling in two bodies.” The Holy Spirit is the work of God, the voice of God,
the very essence of God, living every moment within us, and helping us, in
turn, live every moment within God and his love.
Amen.
[i] I found this and many other adorable Pooh quotes
here:
http://www.winniethepoohquotes.org/category/winnie-the-pooh-friendship-quotes/
[ii] This quote came from this site: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/friendship
[iii] I also found this quote at this site: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/friendship
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