Last week, in the first part of our Circuit Lent Sermon Series, we aimed to answer the question, ‘Why Lent?’ with the reply, ‘To reorient ourselves towards Jesus.’
Reorienting ourselves towards Jesus implies one of the most wonderful truths in the Christian faith: that we were made for a relationship with God through him. It is not something that every major religion claims. For our Muslim friends, the main claim of Islam is the call to submission to God. We believe in that (in a Christian form), but we believe more. Islam has ninety-nine names for God, but one of them is not ‘Father.’
But in Exodus 33:7-11 we heard the remarkable statement that Moses was described as a ‘friend of God.’ Astonishingly, Jesus ups the ante. He says to his disciples in verse 15 of our John reading,
I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.
Disciples of Jesus are friends of Jesus. It seems almost too hard to believe, but that is what he says. Maybe we’ve been put off by those Christians who take this up in such a way that it sounds like they have a chummy and casual relationship with the Almighty. That’s not what I’m talking about. Friendship with the Triune God is inevitably different from ordinary friendships. But it is still friendship.
We’re going to look at it from two angles – Jesus’ side and our side.
Firstly, then, friendship from Jesus’ side:
Verse 9:
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.
‘As the Father has loved me.’ At the heart of God the Holy Trinity is love. That’s why John tells us in his First Epistle that ‘God is love.’ It is the most basic statement about the nature of God that we have. God is love. There is love between the Persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Love was there, which led to creation. God could not hold love within the Godhead, because that would be mutual self-indulgence. Mutual love looks beyond, to love others.
And the divine love was so deep and so rich that even when the pinnacle of creation, the human race made in God’s image, rejected that love, it could not stop. Such was God love that he continued to pursue humans in love, forming a people who would be his witnesses, and continually choosing and sending those who would speak for him, frequently at immense cost. Ultimately, he sent his only begotten Son, because God so loved the world. Or as Jesus put it in our reading in verse 13:
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
And so something else is true that John also said in his First Epistle – not only that God is love, but also that ‘We love, because God first loved us.’ God has consistently made the first move in love towards the human race.
Moreover, within the relationship he seeks to make with us through love, he speaks to us. We have it in what Jesus says in verse 15b:
Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.
Jesus has made known the Father’s will to his disciples. He has engaged in a ministry of teaching. We have the authoritative record of that teaching in the Gospels. Elsewhere in John’s Gospel in chapter 5 Jesus endorsed seeing what we call the Old Testament as pointing to him, so that we might find eternal life. And in chapter 14 he explained how the Holy Spirit would teach his followers all things and remind them of what he had said. It is not just the Gospels, then, but the whole of Scripture that we have for understanding what God says to us through Jesus. Our God speaks to his friends.
Yes, of course, there are some rather unbalanced friends who make some silly claims about God speaking to them. But the solution to misuse of this doctrine is not its disuse but its right and careful use. So we weigh carefully what Jesus is teaching us in the Scriptures. And if someone in the church family believes God is speaking to them in another more temporary way, then we weigh that carefully and prayerfully, too.
Is it not the most natural thing to accept that a friend would love us and would want to speak with us? Next week is my birthday, and usually on that day my Best Man phones me. We don’t speak as often as we might or we could these days, but I can be pretty sure that when he calls it will not be a short phone call. We shall each want to know what the other has been doing, and what our family members have been up to. We shall probably talk about everything from world politics to what music we’ve been listening to.
And is that not a small picture of God in Christ talking to us as his friends? He has the serious matter of his will and his ways to communicate with us, but he also takes interest in the small details of our lives. This is what a friend does. So yes, we can pray for the provision of a parking space, just so long as that isn’t the limit of our prayers!
Secondly, friendship from our side:
Verse 14:
You are my friends if you do what I command.
If I’m honest, that doesn’t sound much like the friendship we experience in everyday life. It’s not normal in a friendship for one party to issue commands to the other. We think of friendships as mutual and equal in status. Doing what one friend commands doesn’t sound like that.
But this is not a conventional friendship. We have already at the beginning been surprised at the thought of the Author of the Universe wanting a friendship with us. Whatever it is, it cannot be the equal and mutual friendship that we are used to.
However, we can have friendships between parents and children. We can have friendships between someone who is in authority and another who is not. There may come a time in such relationships where the one with authority has to say to the other, ‘I need you to do this, please.’ Jesus gives us his commands with the voice of a loving friend, not that of a tyrant. And since in a relationship of friendship we shall want to please our friend, in this case we shall want to please Jesus by doing what he asks of us.
There is a verse in Ephesians where Paul enjoins us to ‘Find out what pleases the Lord’, and while that is sometimes simple and straightforward, at other times it is more of a challenge. The next three weeks of the sermon series will look at various spiritual disciplines we can use to tune in more clearly to what Jesus wants of us, and I don’t want to steal the thunder of other preachers you will hear on those subjects.
However, in the meantime, in this passage Jesus gives us one concrete action we can get on with to show we are serious about responding to his love and friendship by doing something that pleases him. It occurs in verse 12:
My command is this: love each other as I have loved you.
If we want to please Jesus out of friendship, we can love one another. It’s one of those easy to state but harder to practise commands of his. For just as we say about human families that you can choose your friends but not your family, the same is true of our spiritual family. In the church, Jesus puts us alongside people who are not all the same as us. We cross the generations, ethnic backgrounds, health conditions, social classes, educational achievements, finances, political convictions, and all sorts of other things that the world divides on. But Jesus is pleased when we cross those barriers and unite in love in his name, because that is his will and pleasure.
And as I said, it’s easy to state but more challenging to do. We are a varied lot as God’s people, and we don’t always fit together easily. As one book I read on the subject many years ago put it, it is like building with bananas.
But our world needs this witness. We are increasingly divided: just look at the world of politics, where people cannot disagree with one another civilly and instead label their opponents as demonic. Look at social media, where the algorithms keep on feeding you only the stuff they think you agree with, and thus force people into separate silos.
Perhaps it’s no accident that the one illustration Jesus gives us of obeying his commands out of friendship is this one. Love one another. Does it not remain one of the most important ways we can live out our friendship with Jesus? Has it not always been so? Because that friendship makes a practical difference in the world.
You have heard it said that in the early church the observation that pagans made of the first Christians was, ‘See how these Christians love one another.’ Do we not think that in our world a similar witness is needed? Jesus clearly thought it was important, because at the end of the reading in verse 17 he comes back and repeats it:
This is my command: love each other.
Conclusion
Let’s sum up: reorienting ourselves towards Jesus implies that we are being brought into a relationship with God. But more than a relationship, it’s a friendship, even if that sounds strange given our unequal status.
However, God who is in his very inner nature love, has reached out in love to the human race before we ever had a thought for him. In Jesus Christ, this comes to fullest expression in his calling his disciples friends.
Like any friendship, we desire to please our friend. With our status not being equal to that of Jesus, that will entail us obeying his commands.
And Jesus has a particularly important command for us to put into practice right away: love each other.
Other commands may not be as simple to discern as that one, but the next three weeks of this sermon series will introduce us to disciplines that help us listen to find out what pleases the Lord.
In the meantime, we have no excuse but to get on with that simple but challenging command which shows we are serious about our friendship with Jesus.
In the words of a song: we may never have this day again, so let us love like we could love. We may never pass this way again, so let us love like we could love.
Big Circumstance 
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