I no longer call you slaves,
because a slave does not know what his master is doing.
Friendship, according to Aristotle, required equality. For this reason he specifically discounted any possibility of friendship between men and God. But his conception of God was limited, only including what his reason could ascertain. He did not foresee the possibility that God himself would act directly to shift the balance, raising up creatures from their status as slaves to be true friends of God. This was not something one who was merely Prime Mover would do. But it was something that the God of Israel, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit choose to do. There was precedent for this, for Abraham had been called a friend of God, and Moses spoke to God as one would speak to a friend. Yet this was not the experience of ordinary women and men before the coming of Jesus.
I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
Jesus, by his incarnation, established a certain equality between God and his creatures that could serve as a most genuine and certain ground of true relationship, true friendship. His incarnation was a revelation of the true heart of the Father, previously only glimpsed briefly by the greatest of Old Testament saints. It established an equality both of knowledge and also of power, so that we, as true friends, could be of one mind and one heart with Jesus, willing what he himself willed.
so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
It was this friendship with Jesus that Paul shared and that he desired others to share as well, writing, "complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind" (see Philippians 2:2). This is what it means to be a friend. And Jesus himself has exulted us to become such friends with him, and therefore also friends with the Father and the Spirit, and through them with all the saints in heaven and on earth. The reality of this friendship is what David tried to express when he wrote, "As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight" (Psalm 16:3). When Paul said Gentiles and Jews were no longer strangers to one another it was this new supernatural friendship that he envisioned as uniting them (see Ephesians 2:19).
We can not truly share this friendship in name only. Jesus demonstrated the depths of his love by laying down his life for his friends. The love that Jesus displayed is meant to awaken a response in our hearts that motivates us to love as he loved, out of love for him, and for our brothers and sisters. Otherwise we only call ourselves his friends while remaining indifferent to the deepest desire of his heart. We know this wouldn't work with our natural friendships. Much less so then with our Divine Friend. In the past the the commandment was an obligation given only out of fear of punishment. Now the appeal to heed the commandment is now made on the basis of the love Jesus has for us, on the grounds of the friendship that he himself established. May we open our hearts to embrace it.
If you keep free of these,
you will be doing what is right. Farewell.
The Church, for her part, is meant to be the communion of the friends of God, not merely the strangers who occasionally see one another in the pews. It is meant to be the saints on earth who have in common the deepest desires of their hearts. To be this truly and to remain such takes constant effort on the part of all involved. We see this concern working itself out in the reading from Acts as the Council of Jerusalem sent messengers to the Gentile converts to Christianity instructing them on some minimal standards to ensure that they could maintain friendship with Christians from a Jewish background. Friendship between the groups was their goal, not the mere imposition of rules as in a master/slave paradigm. The Church established these guidelines with one accord, by the power of the Spirit, so that those who followed them could also walk in unity, knowing "how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!" (see Psalm 133:1)
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