Does God promise us friends?
A reflection
(The best way to get an essay out of me is to give me something to chew on, and a few days to chew on it. And so thanks to the friend who got me chewing on this one.)
The short answer to this question is no. And the long answer is yes. And the journey between those two is where the fun is.
No, nowhere does God promise to provide us with friends. There are several places in Scripture where people end up acutely friendless: Joseph, Job1, Moses, Jeremiah, Elijah, Psalm 88, and Jesus on the night of his betrayal. It is possible to be very lonely, without a friend in the world, and still be a faithful believer.
But my long answer is yes. And the place to begin with is Mark 10. Here Jesus does make a promise to his followers, that if they have left family or property or whatever to follow him, then God will give them brothers and sisters in this life, and so much more in the world to come.
29 “Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel 30 will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. 31 But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”
Mark 10:29–31 (NIV)
The now and not-yetness of Mark 10 suggests that the "now" are the brothers and sisters we gain in the church. To become a believer in Jesus is to join a new family, and thus church family becomes our real family. I have countless brothers and sisters across space and time, most of whom I do not know.2
To be a sibling is a status of relationship, not the content of a relationship. What do I mean? I have two siblings, a brother and a sister. My brother is my brother and is always my brother. The quality of that relationship does not change his status. We could be the best brothers in the world, or we could be lifelong sworn mortal enemies, but he would still be my brother.
So, God gives us family in the church, but not friends. But here's my follow-up. Friendship is the shape of love. It's the content of that relationship that we are supposed to cultivate with others.
In a particular local church, with particular brothers and sisters, each of us is called to love them individually and specifically. And, it's true, that because we are finite creatures, of limited time and capacities, we cannot in our lifetime be friends with many people. But we are called to love others and the shape of that love is to extend friendship as much as possible, and to grow in friendship with others.
I won't venture a perfect definition of friendship here today, but something like "a relationship of affinity, affection, intimacy, fidelity, and solidarity, which loves the other towards the good". Friendship, unlike marriage, is non-exclusive. Which is why it's the expression of love for all those around us.
A church in which people are friendless, is a church in which people are failing in their calling to love one another. To put it another way, if someone is friendless in the church, it's a failure of the church. It is not necessarily any particular person's failure, though it's likely that both the friendless, and lots of the non-frienders, are contributing to the problem.
If this were a sermon, it's probably about here that I would do a pivot to Jesus. Which is as much to say, that you can and should apply a gospel lens to the question. Jesus is our ultimate friend, the one who always lets us in, never lets us down. He knows us most intimately, and doesn't reject us but loves us. And yet he is the one who experiences ultimate friendlessness - betrayed and rejected by his closest friends, and the ultimate rupture of communion on the cross. In the key of friendship, the melody of the gospel is that Jesus is our true friend who became friendless in our place so that in and through him we could enter into friendship with God forever.
This is true, but it's also actually helpful. Because Jesus is my true and greatest friend, I *can* go and do likewise, extending friendship to others. Friends of Jesus both seek out others in friendship, and invite friends into (ever deeper) friendship with Jesus.
But we are finite. We cannot be friends with everyone, but we must be friends with some particular people. And this can create the collective action problem within the church (or other communities). If everyone is friends with various people, and we cannot be friends with everyone, it can just happen that some people aren't friended by anyone. But that itself is a collective failure, and yet it requires individual action. To see a friendless person in the church, means we must leave our comfort and those we might prefer, and go to them and befriend them. Not out of pity or benevolence or patronising mercy. Simply because if we have befriended Jesus, then a heart moved by love will move to befriend others.
And this is why my long answer is yes. God gives us brothers and sisters in the church, and he commands us to love one another, and the shape of that love must involve friendship.
Depending upon how you read his three ‘friends’. But even so, before they turn up Job appears to be utterly alone in his calamity, apart from a rather unhelpful wife who thinks he is better off cursing God so that he can die.
I think it’s curious that ‘father’ is mentioned in v29 as one category of those that are left, but not in v30 as one category of those we gain. I think this is because the New Testament generally thinks we only have one spiritual Father. On the other hand, there’s no mention here of leaving one’s wife (or husband), which is perhaps shaped by Mark 2:2-10 in which Jesus speaks strongly against divorce.
But beyond all that, I would also point out that God doesn’t promise us spouses, and he doesn’t promise us biological children. The fulfilment of our relational humanity is found in sibling-friendship, not in romantic-monogamy; and yet at the same time in the church we all become parents of many, spiritual children whom we are collectively and sometimes individually given to raise in the Lord.