Musings: Notes From My Daybook

I’m attending a seminar at Rochester College on preaching and the various offerings have been strong.  But what has been particularly encouraging is to see old friends and make a few new ones as well.  In particular, was the trip to Olive Garden (a traditional haunt of the past) with Kent, John, Max, Rex, and Sam.
As I looked around the table and thought of the things that I have shared with three of these good brothers I felt a great sense of gratitude and connectedness.  Short of my own family—and even here I was blessed today by a phone conversation with my cousin Matt, these guy’s lives have intersected my lives at various significant times in life.
One lecturer, Gail O’Day, working on the seminar’s larger theme of the gospel of John, chose to engage the gospel through the framework of friendship.  Setting aside present day casual notions of friendship as someone that you hang out with, O’Day introduced the robust concepts of friendship of the Greco-Roman world.
In the ancient world friendship reflected commitment to one another, a willingness to do for another, even to die for another.  Friendship meant honest, open speech.  A friend was one who spoke truth to you.  The opposite of a friend was a flatterer—who spoke to your vanity.
Using this robust concept of friendship, the gospel of John begins to take on a new hearing.
Listen to the gospel of John:
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. 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.  –John 15.13-15
What Jesus is doing, according to John’s gospel, in going to the cross, is simply doing what friends do.  And, in so doing, he embodies the ideal of friendship.
In a world where relationships are fleeting and multiple diversions distract us from even our families, it might do us good to take Professor O’Day’s lead and think again about the way of Jesus.
. . . .And what would happen wherever a congregation of people take up such a lens for understanding community?