Jesus is My Friend

How do you make friends?  Stop and think about that for a second.  All of us do it a little differently.  For example, I don't make friends as much as I get adopted by extroverts. 

I’m not always completely sure how it happens.  Recently, I was at a meeting for a project I’m working on with a few folks, and there was someone there, who I’d met in the past, but that was it. As we were talking, she looks at me and says, why aren’t we friends, you’re one of my people….and that was it.  Whether I knew it or not, I am now one of her friends…and she’s also recently adopted Emily too.

One of my favorite stories is from Annual Conference.  I’d been down to help some folks set up a booth for Cokesbury, so there were books everywhere. As a thank you, the manager took those of us that were helping out to dinner….for barbeque.  Which is always a good way to get me to go along with anything.

So there we were, up at Buckingham’s, which used to be up on the north side of Springfield, eating and having a good time….then we realized (after a couple of hours) that they were getting ready to close, so we thought we should leave….we made it as far as the parking lot before we all continued our conversations until something like midnight? 1am in the morning?  I don’t really remember what time it was now, only that it was late.  She’s been one of my best friends ever since.

There I was, adopted by another extrovert.

In this post, we’re filling in the blank with Jesus is My Friend.  This one, you can see, got the most responses from folks when I asked the question about how you would fill in the blank. The bigger the word on the cross, the more responses it got.  You can see other posts in this series here.

For me, it is also a trickier sort of thing to think about.  How is Jesus my friend?  Savior, I get that one, Messiah, I get that one, Lord, that’s understandable. Rock? Redeemer? All of those make some sense, those fit in an understanding of who I know Jesus to be.

But friend seems so different than the others.  Part of that, I’ll admit, comes from the fact that I don’t make friends easily.  When I do, they have a tendency to being good friends.  But for all of that, I think that being friends with Jesus is different than any other friend that we have.

Being Jesus friend is both harder than any other friendship that we’ll have, but also more fulfilling, rewarding, and in may ways easier than any other.  Jesus is describing this to his disciples in John 15.

But, we need to look at what’s going on in John 15 in order to see how Jesus is describing how challenging this is.

Jesus sets everything up by telling his disciples, and us, that we have been made ready. God has worked on us to get us ready to be with Jesus, and not just to be with Jesus, but to be able to be his friend...with all that that entails.

Jesus is telling his disciples that it will be a challenge, being his friend, because others aren’t going to like this.  And Jesus is being specific here about who is going to do the hating. 

Verse 25 says this fulfills the word written in their law…"their" being the Jewish leaders.  The people that Jesus has been in conflict with nearly from the very beginning.  Jesus isn’t talking about non-believers here.  He’s talking about the folks, who should also be his friend, but who we discussed in a previous post, aren’t listening for his voice. They are doing so deliberately because they don’t want to hear.  They are going to be the ones that are going to cause problems.

There’s a couple of things to remember here.  The first is that first Jesus was their master.  That’s something always to remember.  Jesus friendship isn’t like when I get adopted by an extrovert.  Jesus friendship is different.  It comes through a different set of circumstances and as a part of who Jesus is in this world.  So he will always first be Lord, or Savior, or Messiah, or Master, but he can also be friend. 

How is Jesus friend?  

He is friend because he doesn’t hold back from us.  He tells us everything that God makes known to him.   Remember, from the Old Testament, to look on God’s face was impossible.  We couldn’t do it. Our senses can't handle looking on God's face, they all shut down.  One of the reasons Jesus comes is because he is God, but God in human form that we can see, that we can know. That helps us better understand what God is doing in this world.

Jesus makes God known to us in a new way, and doesn’t hold back anything, but teaches it to us so that we can understand.  Through that, we become friends because Jesus is drawing us up to a closer level with him.  He is helping us to be more than we can be on our own.  He gives to us so that we can be more.  In return we give to others.

Jesus knows that his time on Earth is getting short, gives his friendship to his disciples, because he has given himself to them. He doesn't hold himself back from them, but also reminds them that he is still Messiah.  Their friendship doesn’t end when life here ends, but it continues in that they are called to go out and do the same for others.

For us, this means that we are called to be different from others.  Different from other believers who don’t really share Jesus love, or who put preconditions on it so that it can be hard to accept.  Also different from others in the world around us who don’t understand what Jesus means. How do we overcome that?

We show them the same sort of love that Jesus showed us.  

We don’t hold back.  

We don’t let our theology, or practices, or other rules get in the way of doing just what Jesus does for us. 

If Jesus is our friend, then he is also our Messiah, meaning that we reach out to others to make friends and share that same love with them.

Go out and share that love.  Don't hold back, but find the way you can share Jesus' love with another person, and do it in Jesus name.