Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/051112.cfm

You are my friends if you do what I command you.
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.
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain…

Friend is one of the most beautiful words in any human language. Unfortunately that means the dominant culture must appropriate it for commercial purposes, as it exploits everything sacred. Currently friend and unfriend have becomes verbs in the Facebook world, with meanings alien to the gospel. But your friendly bank and your friendly electric company also utilize the word and its associations; there are even friendly churches ready to extract its virtue; although friendly church should be redundant like soiled dirt or wet water. I shudder a bit when I hear of friendly churches. I wonder what they want to take from me.

But our minor Christian cultural, partly hidden from the dominant, still treasures the word friend. We wait for God to reveal its meaning. Jesus explains it to us as the opposite of slave. We might have thought the opposite of slave is free, as in free man or free woman. The Roman world knew the meaning of slave and free; most of the Roman Empire was enslaved. But Jesus prefers the word friend as the opposite of slave: I have called you friends.

The disciples of Jesus, from Saint Paul to the present, often describe themselves as slaves of Christ. We find no offence in that usage. It is our great privilege to call ourselves both friends and slaves of Christ. Through him we become free citizens of his kingdom. But the price in either case is high:

love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one's life for one's friends.

I doubt that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, expects friends to lay down their lives for one another. If he did unfriending would not happen so readily. But the expectation is out there. Soldiers are expected to lay down their lives for their country. The Secret Service is supposed to “take a bullet” for the Commander in Chief, and we have seen it happen at least once. Timothy J. McCarthy was shot in the abdomen as he protected President Reagan from assassin John Hinckley, Jr. Nor is the instinct alien to parents who passionately love their children.

Reflecting on our natural courage and loyalty to one another, Saint Paul wrote to the Romans:

Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.(Romans 5: 7-8)

This concept of friend as one who will lay down his life for another is not totally alien to our human nature. It is, however, alien to the world of banks, utilities and too-friendly churches. They don't think that deeply of the meaning of anything except money. As Christians we remember its true meaning -- beautiful, fascinating, mysterious and overwhelming -- and we pray we are found worthy to wear the title of friend.