True Friend

In what city does your best friend live? Do you have a “bestie”? Not everyone can name their best friend. Some have several close friends, but to determine one of them as best can feel impossible. All of your friends are unique. If you are a good friend, you let them be who they truly are; you love and value them freely, and uniquely.

Jesus, we might say, had many friends. Twelve disciples, he called “apostles”.  He invested in them with all his heart: teaching them and trusting them. Among them, he called Peter, James, and John apart for some very special experiences. John’s Gospel refers about five times, to one of the twelve being “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” (John 13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21;7; 21:20) The phrase is never explained in the text. It is safe to say, he loved them all, but the Christian community must have discerned this one to have drawn a special sort of care from Jesus.

Peter was very close to Jesus but had several involved, even contentious interactions with him. We might suspect that he frustrated his teacher at times. I wonder if they all did. (I am certain that I do.) Jesus’s closest friends might have lived in the town of Bethany. Three siblings from there were surely close to Jesus. They were Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Martha had been one who showed Jesus special hospitality, fixing him food when he came to Bethany for a visit. Her sister Mary sat at his feet offering her presence and attention. Jesus wept with them both when their brother Lazarus died. Astoundingly, he raised him from death, and later Lazarus sat at the table with him when he came to the Bethany home. It was there that Mary anointed his feet with costly perfume. What tight friends they all were!

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of Holy Week, we make our steps with Jesus, settling into Jerusalem before our Rabbi’s Last Supper with his friends. We can say as we move along with him we are walking the way of the cross. In our friendship with Jesus, we can surprisingly discover this path of the cross to be the way of life and peace. This wording comes from the collect for Monday in Holy Week which is the same as our weekly collect in Morning Prayer on Fridays. Pray it now, here:

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.

How great a friend you are as you companion with Jesus on this way of the cross: to meet with him in the upper room, to go to dark Gethsemane with him. Your closest friends in your life stay with you through the best and worst times. They would defend you in life and honor you in your death.  The friends Jesus had from Bethany were like this. The Gospel lesson, if we were making Eucharist together in Church today, includes this passage:

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus' feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, "Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?" (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, "Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.  —John 12:1-7

It is hard to bear this contrast between Mary and Judas as we read. Mary of Bethany is the sort of friend who would be with Jesus to the end and would give herself completely in respectful, loving observance at the time of her teacher’s death. Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve chosen, is the disciple who is losing his way, drifting out of friendship, second-guessing all that is happening, and judging other friends of Jesus. When any of us drift like this, Fredrick Buchner says it has a centrifugal force on our being. If we spin long enough we lose parts of our core as they fly to the outer edge. Judas is losing chunks of his inner self.  While Mary is attached to Jesus and anointing him out of love. Judas is unmoored, drifting into the rough chop of spiteful critique. (We might surmise that Jesus would love to pull him back, being ever the very source of forgiveness if only Judas would allow it.)

Let this contrast inform and seal your focus on Jesus in these days of Holy Week. Let your friendship with the Rabbi whom you accompany to the cross grow stronger. These thoughts may recall to you a well-known protestant hymn with the opening verse, What a friend we have in Jesus / All our sins and griefs to bear / What a privilege to carry / Everything to God in prayer. My mind goes to one from our hymnal (#458), even more, connected to Holy Week, but lesser-known:

My song is love unknown, my Savior’s love to me,
love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.
O who am I that for my sake my Lord should take frail flesh, and die.

He came from his blest throne salvation to bestow,
but men made strange, and none the longed-for Christ would know.
But O my friend, my friend indeed, who at my need his life did spend.

I don’t know who, in this daily, earthly, human existence, your best friend is. That one and you are fortunate: give thanks and hold on tight.  All things told, alongside this friend you have a friend who in supernal ways, is your closest friend. Walk with Jesus, this week and always. If you will, I add the final verse.

Here might I stay and sing, no story so divine:
never was love, dear King, never was grief like thine.
This is my friend, in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend.