Friendship and Asymmetry

Themes: Friends

Thesis: the biblical-canonical concept of friendship is not incompatible with radical different-ness between the friends. 

[This train of thought begins here and it part of a series I've been working on since last year. You can find earlier articles by searching for the theme 'friends']

The different-ness of friends can be seen more subtly when we seek to locate the character of biblical-canonical friendships against a broader background of biblical relations. The drama of the Old Testament takes place among a set of characters who are bound together, not by an act of originative free association, but as a family. Israel was begotten, not made. Early in the story, as the plot thickens, so does the blood. Over time the family becomes greatly extended, internecine conflicts erupt, the extended family becomes the dispersed family. But always with the memory that Israel is a family: with all the pre-structured obligations and responsibilities invoked by kin. When the biblical authors need to characterise the relationship of biblical characters, whether to lament or berate, enjoin or celebrate, they find brothers. The usage flows on into the New Testament, the shared participation in the ‘family of Abraham’ becoming one of the key sources (along with the Fatherhood of God) for the Christian practice of referring to co-religionists as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’.

To characterise a relationship as filial is to immediately imply mutuality, that the relationship has a symmetry. Either party could rightly be called the subject of the predicate ‘is my brother/sister’.¹ The biblical-canonical tradition also has plenty to say about other non-mutual, asymmetric relations like master/slave, father/son, etc. But if we consider the biblical-canonical descriptions of friendship, we find that they don’t map easily onto this taxonomy of mutual/non-mutual relations. Biblical-canonical friendship is capable of being quasi-mutual. Clearly, two men (or women?) are envisaged as being able to mutually address each other as ‘friend’. But in the outstanding narrative descriptions of friendship there is a significant reticence to predicate the relation mutually. Abraham is God’s ‘friend’, but the usage is never reversed: God is never Abraham’s friend. We find the same thing with Jesus and his disciples: we do not hear the words, ‘I am your friend, if you do what I command.’ It’s very safe to assume that in both these cases, this subtle lack of mutuality is due to the maximal ontological difference between the parties. As a result, it would be risky to apply this lack of mutuality straightforwardly to human/human friendships. But if it is fair to characterise these relationships as ‘friendship’, and the biblical authors press us in this direction, then our concept of friendship must expand to include a level of difference, of inequality between the friends, that could even result in friendship being asymmetrical, i.e., not having precisely the same quality as it flows from one party to the other.²

Could it even involve obedience?

 

 

Footnotes
1. It’s probably easier to see what I mean if we contrast mutual with asymmetric relations.  A master/servant relation is asymmetric: the master and the servant do not share the same relation to each other. A master and servant cannot change places without changing their relationship. A ‘brother’ or ‘neighbour’ relationship is one in which the parties are equally/mutually ‘brother’ or ‘neighbour’ to each other. This point shouldn’t be confused with the fact that in both asymmetric and mutual relations the parties can be mutually constitutive of each other, i.e., one cannot be ‘master’ without a servant, nor ‘brother’ without a brother.

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2. We must be careful not to overstate our claim at this point. Not every friendship must be founded upon the kind of radical difference presupposed by the Creator/creature divide, but the biblical-canonical history pushes us to recognise that equality, which forms the root of the pathological narcissism Derrida detects in the Western canonical concept – cannot be made an essential quality of friendship.↑

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The equal of his friends?

Themes: Friends

Thesis: the biblical-canonical concept of friendship is not incompatible with radical different-ness between the friends. 

Is equality between friends essential to the concept?

Consider Abraham the pilgrim, the one person in the whole length and breadth of biblical history who is known by the epithet ‘friend’. But whose friend?

But you, Israel, My servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, descendant of Abraham, My friend (Isaiah 41:8 HCSB)

Are You not our God who drove out the inhabitants of this land before Your people Israel and who gave it forever to the descendants of Abraham Your friend? (2Chronicles 20:7 HCSB)

So the Scripture was fulfilled that says, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness, and he was called God’s friend. (James 2:23 HCSB)

Is there any question of equality between these two? Any possibility that they might mutually reflect each others’ greatness back, as in a mirror?

What about Moses, staggering out into darkness after a late night session in the Tent of Meeting, radioactive with the divine presence, spoken to ‘just as a man speaks with his friends’? Did Moses rejoice to see his power imaged in God?

And we have already traced the history of David and Jonathan. Those two who, though both firmly planted in the common soil of humanity, come from such very different fields: the heir of a kingdom, and a youngest son, whose inheritance could be measured in lambs.

It is of course, the echoes of different-ness which reverberate through, and make significant, Jesus’ description of Lazarus as ‘our friend’; And even more so, his deliberate  words to his disciples: ‘you are my friends’.

All these surprising friends! In most of these stories, we get the impression that the narrator reaches for the word ‘friend’ with a shake of the head and bemused expression. The Bible is basically silent on the question of whether friends should be equals, but it speaks volumes of wonderment on the subject of how different they can be. Even if we were to grant that within this history, friendship was normally regarded as between two equals (however that might be measured), the outstanding friendships, the places where the narrator nudges you and says, ‘check this out’, are friendships between two or more who can scarcely be thought together, let alone who belong talking face to face.

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The Friendship Hinge.

Themes: Friends

I’ve been plugging away at a series on ‘Friendship’ for quite a while now. I apologise for the pause and for the fact that this is a rather larger chunk of thought than usual. In a previous post, The Lord of His Friends, we discussed the difficult connection between friendship and obedience drawn by Jesus in John 15:14. “You are my friends if you do what I command”.

Jesus conceives of a compatibility between friendship and obedience which challenges the mutuality and equality at the heart of our received conception. Wouldn’t you be unsettled in the face of two ‘friends’, one of whom demanded obedience from the other? My instinctive reaction would be to try and persuade these two that they’ve misunderstood something about how friendship flows.

Faced by this, we can react in a number of ways: first, we could conceivably claim that Jesus has radically departed from and distorted the true meaning of the word ‘friend’ – that obedience is genuinely incompatible with the essential freedom that must obtain between individuals in friendly relation. But this is an unfriendly reading of Jesus’ words, not an interpretation open to anyone who has been washed with his hands.

Secondly, we could accept Jesus’ words as a true statement about friendship, but only inasmuch as it relates to friendship with him. Just as he is always Lord as Servant, and Servant as Lord, he is also, utterly uniquely, Lord/Servant as friend. Just because he is who he is, unlike any other, he is a friend unlike any other. And so, his Lordly friendship, while unquestionably friendship, cannot be the model for thinking about the kind of friendliness which might flow between us. The concept is too far transformed through contact with his person. But then, claiming us as friends, would Jesus leave us to our own devices to figure out what this means? Is he that unfriendly?

There might be a third way. Recognising there’s more than a little truth to the point above, perhaps we can plot our way forward by recognising that, with reference to himself, Jesus does work a variation on our generic understanding of friendship, but not in a way that runs against the grain of the concept. By this I mean that, while Jesus’ is a unique instance of friendship, he is still working within the implications and latencies of the term. Actually, this doesn’t do justice to who Jesus really is. I’d like to go even farther: as the Creative Word, the person through whom the Father brought the world into existence with all its patterns, orders, particulars, and concepts; and as the Creative Word, the original speaker and framer of language, Jesus Christ is the transcendental foundation of friendship. ‘Transcendental’ is a term (given its philosophical meaning by Immanuel Kant) to describe the foundational conditions upon which our experience of something depends, but which are not themselves capable of being directly experienced. For the purposes of our discussion, to claim that Jesus Christ is the ‘transcendental foundation of friendship’ amounts to saying this: we can never be Jesus, or have his relation to the world or his people, but God’s action toward the world in Christ, creating, loving, sustaining, redeeming, is the basis and frame for all our experience, including the experience of friendship. So we can’t rule out Jesus’ words and actions as irrelevant for our discussion of friendship, we also can’t simply make them paradigmatic in a way that ignores his uniqueness. We need to employ an ‘analogical’ method and pay careful attention to the lines of similarity Jesus draws between friendship with him and friendship with each other. We need to let Jesus speak and teach us. And we must also be careful to pay attention to the fact that he speaks throughout the whole biblical canon. Our analogical method is disciplined (analogies have a tendency to become feral) by attending to Jesus’ own usage of the concept, both in his incarnate words and actions, and as the Spirit interprets these words and actions to us through the rest of the Bible.

Before we move on, just to reassure you that I’m not plucking this concept of analogy out of the air, look back at Jesus’ words again:

This is My command: Love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. (John 15:12–14 HCSB)

Do you notice the form of verse 13 (the middle sentence)? It’s very ‘general’ sounding, like a proverb or aphorism. In fact, as a proverbial-type saying, it doesn’t sound entirely unlike a passage in Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics we read, “To a noble man there applies the true saying that he does all things for the sake of his friends… and, if need be, he gives his life for them.” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1169a).

Jesus’ little proverb links together his action and attitude toward the disciples with their behaviour toward each other. The proverb crystallises the meaning of the ‘love’ command in verse 12 (‘love like the best kind of friend’). But in doing this, the proverb also extends the meaning of ‘friend-love’ by connecting it with Jesus’ own actions, saying in effect: No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends, as I am doing for you. This is precisely the dramatic rhetorical effect of moving from the general proverb to the emphatic “You are my friends”. These three little verses are an analogical hinge, allowing us to connect Jesus’ friendship toward us with that which flows between us.

Jesus has more to say in this passage, and we must also look out at the wider biblical picture, but in principle, the path forward seems sound. We still need to puzzle out the relation between obedience and mutuality, but we can at least be confident that Jesus teaches us friendship.

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The Lord of his friends

Themes: Friends

Jesus turns to the men sharing his table, who have shared his life and been washed by his hands, and calls them ‘friends’. But what kind of friendship is it?

“You are My friends if you do what I command you.”

That sounds like a remarkably conditional form of friendship. The phrase is jarring, almost embarrassing, as though Jesus at this intimate moment reveals an ultimate egocentricity. Does he not actually understand friendship: that it cannot be commanded or conditioned like this?

Of course there a many different ways in which a condition can function. If we heard these words on the lips of a human political manipulator, they would sound like a threat. But when spoken by Jesus they are transformed by his story and his prior action. His command is that they love each other, as I have loved you, i.e., wrapped in a rough towel and not afraid to touch another’s toes; not afraid to travel into the jaws of danger for Lazarus; and as the disciples are beginning to dimly understand, soon to be seen naked against the grain of the Cross. The content of this command is certainly not incompatible with the love that friends bear.

Our problem then, seems to revolve around the intrusion of this notion of ‘commanding’ upon our concept of friendship. We must quickly despatch the idea, however, that the disciples become Jesus’ friends through obedience to his command. The context makes perfectly clear that this conditionality relates to a friendship already initiated and named by him. Rank, calculated disobedience to Jesus is unquestionably incompatible with claiming his friendship, but just because obedience is a necessary condition doesn’t mean it’s sufficient. It seems more likely that we should regard this as an ‘evidential’ condition, a way for us to verify someone’s claim to friendship with Jesus, rather than a ‘generative’ condition: one that makes the claim true.

And this is so because Jesus is always Lord of his friends, even while washing their feet, or laying down his life. Perhaps to our increasing embarrassment, he goes on in verse 16 to say, “You did not choose Me, but I chose you.” Friendship with Jesus does not come through the satisfaction of a condition, but only through his own initiation: his ‘electing’.

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You, I call friends

Themes: Friends

Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end. (John 13:1 HCSB)

As Peter gazed upon the scalp of the Christ, the head bowed over his road-grimed feet, and  felt the carpenter’s fingers carve the dirt from his toes, the rasping of the towel, he partook of the body and blood of the Lord. John’s account of Jesus’ final night with his disciples is striking for the way he substitutes the synoptic account of Jesus’ breaking and sharing of the bread and cup, with this poignant washing.  “If I don’t wash you, you have no part with Me.” (John 13:8 HCSB)

The one who kneels here, the outstretched arm of Yahweh, the incarnate omnipotence, is the figure of the Lord as Servant. And what he was, in eternal glory with his Father, he will be again, even as he hangs between heaven and hell: the Servant as Lord. But perhaps most mysterious of all, between here and there, he will be friend.

“I have spoken these things to you so that My joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. This is My command: Love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you slaves anymore, because a slave doesn’t know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from My Father. You did not choose Me, but I chose you. I appointed you that you should go out and produce fruit and that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He will give you. This is what I command you: Love one another. (John 15:11–17 HCSB)

This paragraph fascinates and disturbs me. Even without any familiarity with the other Gospels, or the wider narrative of John, we get the immediate sense that when Jesus addresses his disciples as ‘friends’, something happens, it is a phrase pregnant with meaning. He draws attention to this innovation himself: “You, I call friends”.¹

Are the disciples shocked by this, staring at him with open mouths? Are they flattered, unsettled?

If we cast our net more widely through the Gospels, the novelty of Jesus’ language becomes increasingly apparent. Only on one other occasion does he address a group of people as his ‘friends’ (Luke 12:4). In this case, Jesus is addressing a crowd of many thousands and the usage is primarily rhetorical, there is nothing of the personal intimacy we find in this drawn out farewell. Certainly, there are many other occasions where Jesus is charged with being a ‘friend of sinners’ by his enemies. The intended moral obloquy in the phrase becomes a rich source of irony for the Gospel writers, but it is not a phrase we find on the lips of Jesus himself. Nope, it’s really only here, that we find Jesus with ‘friends’.

¹ The English translations uniformly struggle to deal with the Greek tense-forms in this passage. When Jesus says, ‘I have called you friends’ (v.15), the ‘I have called’ translates a single perfect tense-form verb. Older grammarians argued that this indicated a past state of affairs with ongoing consequences (hence the translation), but recent verbal aspect theory questions this solution. The Greek phrase is ὑμᾶς δὲ εἴρηκα φίλους. The fronting of the pronoun ὑμᾶς is emphatic, ‘You (and not others), I call friends’. It parallels the emphatic ‘You are my friends’ in verse 14.  The perfect tense-form verb is probably also intending to highlight this dramatic moment as it unfolds around them, rather than referring to a past state of affairs. The use of the perfect verb is doubly striking in that the passage continues on with a series of aorists: I made known to you, I chose you, I appointed you. These verbs form the narrative explanation for why Jesus has just now referred to them as friends and will continue to do so.

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Lazarus our friend

Themes: Friends

When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw Him, she fell at His feet and told Him, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died!”
When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, He was angry in His spirit and deeply moved.
“Where have you put him?” He asked. “Lord,” they told Him, “come and see.”
Jesus wept.
So the Jews said, “See how He loved him!”
(John 11:32–37 HCSB)

We find ourselves beside another grave. Lazarus’. “See how he loved him!” Come closer…

Sometimes we are too overtaken by the heady experience of witnessing Lazarus’ resurrection that we miss the unmistakable connection between this story and Jesus’ final destination. The one who will shortly say, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” begins laying down his life right here. (John connects the two episodes verbally: Jesus speaks of “Lazarus the friend of ours” (Lit.), the only reference to friendship with Jesus other than in John 15:11ff). Jesus’ makes the trip to Lazarus’ grave over the protests of his disciples. It is a trip into the heartland of enemy territory where the Jewish leaders are waiting to capture and kill him. Thomas’ words capture the disciple’s outlook: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” (John 11:16, NIV).

When Jesus first heard the news he had promised a good outcome for Lazarus, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” (John 11:4 NIV) If you’ve been paying attention to Jesus’ talk of glorification throughout John’s Gospel, you’ll know, however, that ‘glorification’ is his way of talking about ‘crucifixion’.

The Son of David weeps, and speaks. Lazarus walks.

On the basis of this miracle the chief priests and Pharisees convene the Sanhedrin and take the final decision to have Jesus killed (John 11:45-54). In coming to the grave of his friend, and leading him up out of it, Jesus signed his death warrant.

With Lazarus we begin to smell the hint of a promise that friendship might return from death. That it might be more than the endlessly anti-climatic experience of David and Jonathan. But as soon as we begin to hope, the friend begins to depart. Jesus announces himself as a friend, in the very movement that he goes to the Cross. Is friendship finished or unfinished by this departure?

Image: The Raising of Lazarus. Statue by Sir Jacob Epstein in New College Chapel, Oxford. Photo by Lawrence OP

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