Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter

A footbridge in Trim, County Meath, Ireland

I no longer call you slaves,

because a slave does not know what his master is doing.
I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.

When I was a high school seminarian at Mount Saint Francis our professors coordinated their efforts and introduced us to the theme of friendship in our religion, literature and Latin courses. I remember especially Cicero and his essay De Amicitia:

Friendship is nothing else than entire fellow feeling as to all things human and divine with mutual good-will and affection; and I doubt whether anything better than this, wisdom alone excepted, has been given to man by the immortal gods. Some prefer riches to it, some, sound health, some, power, some, posts of honor, many, even sensual gratification. This last properly belongs to beasts, the others are precarious and uncertain, dependent not on our own choice so much as on the caprice of Fortune. Those, indeed, who regard virtue as the supreme good are entirely in the right, but it is virtue itself that produces and sustains friendship; without virtue friendship cannot by any possibility exist.

Even the “pagan” Greek and Roman writers knew how “precarious and uncertain” are health, power and posts of honor; and how reliable is friendship. This wisdom was taught throughout the ancient world. If our schools still taught the classics our children would learn that those who neglect their families as they build their fortune build houses on sand.

Jesus’ gift of friendship is an eternally assured covenant: “You shall be mine and I shall be yours.” So long as there is a future we have friendship with God.

His gift of divine friendship is more than the patronage the ancients sought from their gods. He is not simply our protector and benefactor in exchange for our loyalty and devotion. A patron doesn’t owe his clients intimate love or confidential information. He will use them for his own purposes and they will serve him in the hope of reward. He makes disclosures to them on a “need to know” basis. But Jesus has told us “everything I have heard from my father.”

In John’s gospel the only person called a friend of Jesus is Lazarus; and, by calling him from the grave Jesus signed his own death warrant. This was to fulfill his own words, “Greater love than this no man has than to lay down his life for his friend.”

Lazarus represents each of us; we are friends of Jesus. Although we remain under his discipline; choose the narrow gate; and follow the road to Calvary; we enjoy the assurance of his words, “I call you friends.”