It occurs to me on a fairly regular basis that many christians are so occupied with being the
church that they never really manage to be anyone's
friend. It's interesting that such a thing is possible to justify, that such a state is possible to come to. To be sure, it seems like Jesus had an agenda in building His church ("...and on this rock I will build my church," 'The Great Commission,' etc.) But He says elsewhere that no one has a greater love than that he lay down his life for his friends. He says that the greatest command-- the
greatest command-- is to love the Lord your God with everything you have. Then John says that the one who does not love does not know God because God
is love, and that someone who doesn't love his brother whom he has seen couldn't possibly love God whom he hasn't seen. If you patch all that together (and there are plenty of other passages to prop it up with if you care to look 'em up--including, but still not limited to, the second greatest command) you're left with the following conditional: if you want to be obedient to God (i.e., be a lover of God) then you have to love other people, and if you want to seriously love other people, then you have to lay your life down for them. So by inference, if you want to be obedient to God you must lay down your life your friends.
That, of course, is terribly inconvenient, and a loophole's gotta be found-- else you've got Christendom running about pell mell, tripping all over itself trying to love just everyone; and how's a movement going to get anywhere like that? The trick to getting a more favorable outcome, just as in any formula, is to manipulate a variable. In this case, "discipleship" (obedience requiring love) and "love" (laying down one's life) are fairly tightly defined. So the malleable term is "friend."
If we want a convenient relationship with God then, we just make friendship a matter of convenience. Someone get on the nerves? Then how could he be a friend? Someone step on your ego? Surely no friend would do that. Don't want to "get in the arena," or "step into the ring"? Just find a way to make that erstwhile recipient of your life responsible for not being worthwhile-- a swine before whom you'd otherwise be tossing your pearls. Easy as pie.
Now i can go through life without the hardship, rollin', swangin', patrollin', going to church, chucking handfuls of change at homeless people, making the money, lovin' on the missus, singing carols to the house-bound, getting my ducks in a Euclidean row-- all with the intent of standing before God on That Day and saying, "i went through life
willing to lay it down for my friend; i just never managed to run across one."
"And i'd like it, moreover, to be left out of this hearing as circumstantial evidence that Jesus maintained a marginally looser definition of 'friend' than i have."
