I have called you friends
Elsewhere in Acts, St. Barnabas is called “the son of consolation” or encouragement; a lovely and suggestive image (Acts 4.36). Do we not sometimes find strength and comfort, in short, our consolation, from one another? To be sure. But what, really, is our consolation? The radical message of this Sunday is that it is found simply in our abiding in the dynamic love of God the Blessed Trinity, our abiding in the grace of God. “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain,” Jesus says. The Lesson from Acts locates Barnabas within that sense of ministry, “Who, when he came [to Antioch], and had seen the grace of God, was glad; and exhorted them all that, with purpose of heart, they would cleave unto the Lord” (Acts 11.23). The consolation of Barnabas lies in that exhortation to cleave unto the Lord. It was in Antioch, Luke tells us in his understated way, that “the disciples were first called Christians” (Acts. 11.26).
The Gospel for this feast complements the lessons from John’s first Epistle which belong to the first two Sundays in the early days of the Trinity season about the divine love which commands us to love. The Gospel for the Feast of St. Barnabas 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.” It is the last, and to my mind, one of the greatest of the “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel. They illuminate two things: first, Christ as God echoing Exodus, “I Am Who I Am,” and, secondly, the forms of our incorporation into his life by way of a series of intimate metaphors, “bread”, “light”, “door”, “shepherd”, “resurrection”, “way, truth and life”, “vine”.
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.
Friendship 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 no longer be 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 abuse and misuse of power.
The Greeks, too, 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 even in the face of the animosity of Saul, Jonathan’s father, towards David.
But perhaps the highest form of consolation is found in Boethius’ famous 6th century treatise, The Consolation of Philosophy. It is about the friendship of ideas that belong to our friendship with God as Lady Philosophy, who befriends Boethius, teaches so profoundly. The whole treatise, as C.S. Lewis notes, is simply about a philosophical reflection on certain Christian ideas, particularly the Providence of God. In short, Boethius is recalled to a way of thinking that allows us to face and understand the ups and downs, the vagaries of the finite and fallen world and ourselves, without collapsing God into our ambitions and expectations. The explicit scriptural references are few, to be sure, but quite profound. “The highest good” she says, quoting Wisdom (8.1), is that “which rules all things firmly, and sweetly disposes them”, fortiter et suaviter. The argument delights him, makes him glad, he says, but “much more the very words you use”. This complements his own teaching in one of his theological treatises “that everything that is good is good by participation in the good”. Lady Philosophy is recalling him to what he already knows but has forgotten. There is no good, no happiness, no fulfillment, apart from the goodness of God.
We cannot just hear this, we have to think it, the treatise suggests, by grasping the nature of Providence. What appears to us to be divided and unjust belongs to the divided and limited nature of the forms of our knowing; but it is all united and one, just and good, in God. Our knowing and experience of things is incomplete. We see “but in a glass darkly.” Lady Philosophy consoles us in the truest sense by reminding us of how things are known and united in the divine simplicity of God, the eternal Now for whom there is no past, no future. “What is, what has been, and what is to come,/ In one swift mental stab he sees”. This is the basis for the redemption of the forms of our knowing; they all participate in what is higher. It is the opposite to the reductive tendencies of our worldly thinking; all our partial knowing belongs – our senses, our imagination, our reason – to the complete knowing and understanding (intelligentia) of God and as such to our being known as we are known in God’s eternal knowing and loving. God, as C.S. Lewis cogently puts it, doesn’t foresee; “he simply sees”. This is the great consolation of divine friendship.
In Christ, God declares himself our friend. This shows something of the deeper meaning of the refrain of the Trinity season 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 Cicero’s 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. It requires our attention to the words of Jesus. “You are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.” We are to find our delight, our good, in our attention to the Word of God by the Spirit of God who is constantly “teaching us all things and bringing to our remembrance whatsoever Jesus has said unto us.” This is the consolation of the liturgy. It cannot be a flight from the world, an escape from material creation or an escape from the body but a way of thinking and facing the world. Salvation for Christians, as Christopher Lasch notes, is the opposite of such gnostic flights; it is found in “reconciliation to the justice and beauty of a world that nonetheless includes evil”. And which is its overcoming, we might add.
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. Such, it seems, is the radical meaning of the apostolic fellowship wonderfully illustrated for us in the figure of St. Barnabas. “You are my friends,” Jesus says, but only by our abiding in the love of the Trinity.
“I have called you friends”
Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Barnabas/ Trinity I
June 11th, 2023