Sermon for the Feast of St. Barnabas
I have called you friends
St. Barnabas is sometimes known as “the son of consolation.” Do we not sometimes find strength and comfort, in short, our consolation from one another? To be sure. And what is our consolation? Simply our abiding in the love of God the Blessed Trinity. The Gospel for this feast complements the lessons from John’s first Epistle which we have heard on these past two Sundays in the early days of the Trinity season about the divine love which commands us to love. And this Gospel follows directly upon one of the greatest Scriptural images of our abiding in the love of God; namely, the idea of the vine and the branches. “I am the vine, ye are the branches,” Jesus says, “abide in me.”
Yet the most powerful statement about our abiding in the love of God appears in this astounding statement where Jesus says “ye are my friends.” Somehow in Christ we are made the friends of God and so, too, friends of one another.
It is a powerful idea and one which has an ancient and profound pedigree. It reaches back to the story of Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh. Enkidu is created by the gods to be a second self to Gilgamesh so that in respecting and honouring the other he will be no longer a domineering and brutal king, a bad king but a good king who seeks the good of his people. Friendship appears as the solution to the problem of bad kingship, to the misuse and abuse of power.
And sometimes the Greeks, too, can imagine a kind of commonality between the gods and men. “Two of a kind are we, deceivers both,” Athena says to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, implying a kind of commonality at least of character. And in the Old Testament there is the wonderful friendship between Jonathan and David, a kind of kinship of the soul.
One could go on but the point is that in Christ, God declares himself our friend. This shows something of the deeper meaning of the Trinity mantra that “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” In a beautiful treatise that takes up the ancient theme of friendship, such as in Cicero’s treatise de amicitia, Aelred of Rievaulx’s 12th century work, Spiritual Friendship, goes so far as to suggest that “God is friendship”.
What does friendship mean? It means our attention to the good of one another in the goodness of God. The divine friendship shapes our fellowship, our care and concern for one another. That is our consolation and strength. It is about the goodness of God in us making us good and, indeed, good for one another. Such is the power of the Trinity. It is altogether about our abiding in the love of God intentionally and thoughtfully, attending to the Good that is God in all things.
I have called you friends
Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Barnabas, June 11th, 2018
