Friendship

It all started in church Sunday: the sermon was on the difference between friendship and Christian fellowship. As Pastor Holman described it, friendship is basically tit-for-tat, and you hang out with the person because you enjoy the process. Fellowship is cross-centered: if there were no Jesus, you would assuredly not hang out with these people. You keep having Christian fellowship even when your life stage changes. "This is how you can tell whether you have friendship or fellowship: just let your friend disappoint you." You have friends for a season, and then you have the church for eternity. And fellowship is a deep joy, an actual happy thing.

Today in chapel, Dr. Smith talked about friendship. According to “a certain pagan philosopher,” friendship requires locality and equality. There’s a fair amount of Scriptural support for that, including a bit in Psalm 55 I’d never noticed before. That’s on a human level. As Dr. Smith rightly pointed out, God is not our equal. So how on earth do you get weird statements from Jesus like, “You all are not my slaves any more, but my friends”? The relationship is generally expressed in terms of unlike: Creator and creation, Shepherd and sheep, master and servant. Dr. Smith seemed to say there were two types of friendship, one in which the equals giving equally, and the other in which only one can actually give and the other only receive. This second kind arises from God’s great condescension: the great Coming Down to Be With Us. It strikes me that this is only possible with the Incarnation, the Word made flesh and dwelling among us. God became man—equal—and dwelt with us—hung out in our place. He lives with us. Aristotle was all about true friends living with each other.

I don’t think Pastor Holman paid friendship its proper due: in fact, I think he was talking about what Aristotle called a “friendship of utility,” which is a debased form of friendship. The pastor's distinction, though, is helpful, even if his terminology was a bit muddying. Friendship in the sense Dr. Smith was using it—in the David-and-Jonathan sense—is all about love interested in the good of the other. There’s also the verse in Ecclesiastes about friendship and a cord of three strands, how you, me, and God make a true friendship.