“I have called you friends”

St. Paul famously instructs the Corinthian church, “So faith, hope, love, remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Yet, what does this love look like in practice?

At the Last Supper, Jesus tells his apostles, “This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.”

Is friendship what love actually looks like in practice? Our first impression might be that equating friendship with the primary theological virtue trivializes love. We laugh with friends, or golf together, or travel with one another, and may be inclined to consider friendship an appendage to love rather than its visible presence in the world.

We know from experience that friendship is more than feelings, though friendship is often accompanied by feelings. We know by experience that our feelings for even our best friends aren’t always as positive as we’d prefer, as when friendship gets in the way of something we’d rather do, or not do. One way to think about friendship is as a huge canvas, a work of art with a profound theme, yet a work that appears different from a distance than when close up, different depending on the light in which it is viewed, different when focusing on one detail versus another.

What might be the common theme of this grand art? Simply put, in the way friendship is expressed by Jesus in his words and actions on Earth.

Consider our relationship with God. Friendship with God might be reduced—though there is nothing reducing about this—to seeking God’s will in all matters and then striving to do it, something countless saints have articulated and practiced. “I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.”

Family encompasses a special kind of friendship. Between spouses, a degree of commitment unto indomitable presence is necessary in every stage of life. Then, faithfully fulfilling one’s responsibility to each family member according to our relationship with that person and their specific needs, responsibilities that invariably change with time.

We come next to friendship as commonly understood in society, often via a limited perspective, that is, those we think of as “friends.” Here, seeking and bestowing joy is a prominent theme, though far from the only theme when those friendships require sacrifice. One could argue that the frivolity connected with typical friendships can contribute to our dismissing friendship as being of the same order as love, a view that can diminish the broad scope of true friendship.

With co-workers, colleagues, neighbors, friendship often features a disposition of justice and mercy in the measure required, rather than succumbing to the human temptation to reduce people to a throng, or worse, anonymity. Jesus fed crowds of 5,000 and 4,000, but, in reality, he feeds each man, woman, and child in those crowds, as “sheep without a shepherd,” as friends.

The poor, the needy, and the stranger are yet another brand of friendship, what might be called practical solidarity, often remote from feelings, or even contrary to feelings. Yet, Jesus profoundly befriended such as these.

If one can practice this range of friendship—daunting, demanding, transforming—could it not be said the “greatest of these”—love—is thereby brought to life?

To live this range of friendship is to live heroically. Imagine a high school built in 1970 and closed in 2005. By most standards, that school was a failure. But friends from that school still see each other often, some every week; they’ve done beautiful, generous things together; vocations to the priesthood came from that school. The school helped to make them who they are, to bond them for life. A failure? No.

When the angel Clarence, in It’s A Wonderful Life, admonishes George Bailey that “… remember, no man is a failure who has friends,” he gets to the heart of the most important thing a person can pursue in life.

That big canvas can look small when we fix on this or that detail or stand at too great a distance or when the light’s too dim to see the image clearly, but those impediments are influenced by our perspective and have no bearing on the grandeur of the painting itself.

So with us, no matter our feelings or weaknesses, our friendships depict the essential truth and beauty that the Master Artist himself bestows on human friendship.

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