The Power of Friendship

We continue on our journey through this year's Holy Week with a pause in our reflections on suffering. This pause is to contemplate the sweetness of friendship and loving fellowship together.

One of the great privileges I have enjoyed in my years of pastoral ministry is being invited to join the various fellowship groups that exist in churches across the conference. Often these fellowships take the form of a men's or women's breakfast. Here in Pocatello, there is a women's breakfast fellowship that has been in existence for two or three decades. The women of this fellowship have carried each other through divorces, deaths of spouses, deaths of children, cancer treatments, job losses, children gone astray and numerous other times of hardship, struggle and pain. One member told me, "I don't know where I would be today without this group."


In chapters 13-17 of the Gospel of John, we have the longest narrative from the early church concerning the last meal that Jesus shared with his disciples. It is a poignant story. Jesus has traveled throughout the Roman province of Palestine with his closest associates for three years (in John's reckoning), and has generated excitement and fear over his preaching. A few weeks previous to this meal, which was a Passover meal celebrated in Jerusalem,  Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and the messianic fever of the crowds is reaching a peak. Yet opposition to him has also grown, and he has escaped arrest by some members of the Pharisees and other Judean religious leaders several times. Through it all, he has not been a lone wolf running on his own, but has been in the constant company of his closest disciples. 


In the meal in what is called an upper room in Luke's gospel, Jesus meets with these men and women. There is a heavy sense of foreboding in the air, a feeling that Jesus perceives most acutely. What will he tell these people who have grown close to his heart, who have shared his triumphs and experienced the compassionate outpouring of his love? How can he bolster them in the midst of their fear and prepare them for what lies ahead? What talisman of his power can he leave behind to provide sufficient strength and fortitude to carry them through not only the next few days but into the months and years and centuries beyond? 


Jesus understood his mission to be a revelation of God to the world. At one point he declares "I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly." In the prologue of the Gospel of John, the writer declares that in Jesus (the Word) was life and this life was the light of humankind. Now Jesus has gathered with his friends on the eve of perhaps the greatest time of darkness in their lives. What light could Jesus bring to them?


What he offered them wasn't the power to part the waters or toss mountains into the sea, it wasn't the might to subdue foreign armies or the ability to heal dread diseases with a single word. No, what he left them was the power of loving friendship.

In John 15:12-17, Jesus says, "No longer do I call you servants... but I call you friends." These men and women have sat at Jesus' feet as students sit at their teacher's feet. They have called him Lord, Master, Rabbi, all titles of respect to one in authority over them. But now Jesus changes all that. He says, "you are my friends." In Greek, the word is philous, which refers to the sort of love we experience in close human fellowship. 

Plain and simple human friendship is one of the most powerful forces in the world. Humans are social animals. We have survived millennia of evolution across the wilds of the world through our banding together in families, clans and communities. We have formed countless social organizations that have helped the poor, the orphaned, the homeless, those with this or that medical disability or disease, the refugees, and people devastated by natural disasters. We need one another. We give strength to one another in seasons of struggle, and we dance in joy and glee at each others' triumphs and achievements.


Jesus knew that friendship would be the uplifting power necessary to propel his message across the world, and the sustaining power necessary to keep it going on into the future. Jesus did not leave behind a hierarchy of rank and privilege. He left behind a circle of friends. All hell has raged against that circle, and it remains as strong today as it was then. 


Just ask the ladies of our breakfast fellowship.