God’s Friends
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Thinking about the three congregations I have served, I thought the tag-line we could put on our sign by the road is “The church that doesn’t ask very much.” Don’t misunderstand me, there are many good people who do a lot and do it selflessly, but the general culture of my mainline denomination is that we go to church rather than that we are the church. Contrary to us, Anabaptists have always had a sense of being a minority, and understanding oneself as a minority brings about a different ethos, for better and for worse. I don’t plan to go anywhere. Yet the only thing my denomination asks is that one subscribe to a set of liberal values not only predictable but indistinguishable from the values of our secular society.
There are many reasons that this is so. Some years ago I examined our hymn book and noticed that an ecclesiology is absent from most of our hymns. And perhaps this is not surprising, as we often are more shaped by the culture in which we live than by the Gospel.
Not having an ecclesiology is problematic because if we don’t have one we may think that we do not need the church. It is also problematic in an increasingly tribal culture, for if we cannot see that in Christ God has broken down the dividing wall, we may think that our friends are those who belong to the same socio-economic group, or those who think like us, not those who, like us, were brought near by the blood of Christ. (Eph 2)
This attachment to those who are like us might indicate that we are more attached to who we were before we became part of the body of Christ than we are to the body; and if we are not attached to the body, we are not attached to Christ.
So when Jesus speaks of himself as the vine and us as the branches, he speaks not only of our dependence on him. The images Jesus uses highlight that this isn’t just about the individual believer; there is no Jesus-and-I— we are called into a community. Jesus calls us his friends.
When in the last verse of our passage Jesus says, “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another,” then this further highlights the community. Jesus does not say that this is about loving him, though we may contemplate whether it is by loving his body that we love him.
Loving each other includes suffering, even giving our lives for one another. For when we love someone we share in their life.
In January 2023 the musician Nick Cave responded to a query about a song a fan had commissioned with ChatGPT. Cave replied that the song ‘sucked’. More importantly, he said, that “songs arise out of suffering, (… ) they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation.” And a little while later he describes the creation of a song as “the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery.” Here, Cave does not speak of church or community, but I believe that the experience of one’s vulnerability in perilousness, one’s smallness, as well as discovery, happen in community.
Community is indeed a source of suffering, for one cannot be attached to others and not suffer. So the refusal to enter into community is the refusal to suffer, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Yet while community is a source of suffering it is also a source of joy, for it is in the community of the church that we find belonging because Jesus has made us his friends.