Now may the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.
Hebrews 13:20-21
Truly free people are operating in God-consciousness all the time. Hearing his voice and following him into the moments and connections of life. The deception and disobedience of the Fall plunged man and woman, the prize of God's creation, into self-consciousness where greed, individuality, self-protection, self-love (as well as self-hatred), and deception constructed an alternative reality to the divine Reality of God's presence and goodness. It supplanted God's love - that God is love - with all manner of substitutes, unleashing destructiveness in every sphere of life, including calling what is evil, good.
In following Jesus, ransomed by his blood alone and raised in his life, we are led into a great spaciousness of transformation to live out the incarnated life of Christ in us. Our minds, bodies, souls, and spirits are directed and empowered by the Holy Spirit to be instruments of God's love, working in his Vision, his Reality, which is the kingdom of heaven.
In his beautiful book, “Beyond Loneliness, the Gift of God's Friendship,” Trevor Hudson describes the God vision this way:
“From the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus' life and message revolve totally around God's dream for the world. In language familiar to first-century Jews, Jesus calls this dream "The Kingdom of God". God's kingdom is where God rules and reigns, where God's will is done, and where what God wants to happen happens. (Emphasis mine). Wherever Jesus goes, he makes that dream a reality. He lives out God's dream and calls every man, woman and child to join him.” (p.64)
I think that is a beautiful expression of the life of Jesus. Working in God's dream is no isolated task, in fact it is no task at all. To be real in the midst of hostility, oppression, brutality, control, and madness, Jesus built and is building a community, his body in Christ, of which he is the
head. To Hudson, the heart of this community is God's desire “to be friends with his people and for us to be friends with each other.” Hudson quotes William A. Barry, SJ, a powerful voice in the sphere of spiritual direction, enlarging that thought:
“God wants a world where we human beings live in harmony and friendship with God, with one another, and with the rest of creation, co-operating with God wherever we are.”
We see in the opening benediction from Hebrews that the absolute substitutionary work of God miraculously transforms our lives into:
What is pleasing to Him.
And Paul is ever preaching, as the writer of Hebrews does in this passage, that there is no peace and no resurrection life apart from the blood of Jesus. The blood is the narrow way that reopens friendship with God and is the passage through which each must pass to know the reality of the incarnational life of Christ and to live according to the Spirit. Sadly, I meet so many who are separated from the sacramental reality of the blood and only know it conceptually. In the flow of that blood, all the destructiveness, falseness, and shame are washed away, and we are newly created in Christ. We have a new Father, a new family, and a new bloodline in the genetics of Jesus. A whole new inheritance. The cataclysmic act of friendship, laying down his life, is the gift of God's friendship and an ongoing invitation into that reality.
The subject of friendship has confronted me in several different contexts and sources lately, so I am paying attention. My small men's group of over thirty years worked through Trevor Hudson’s book in our weekly meetings with remarkable results in intimacy and vulnerability; in the practical ways we discovered to help each other; in the attentive ways, we learned to listen to each other without the immediate need to move on to something else. We also found ourselves stopping in the moment to pray and bless the visible work of God in each other. None of these things were entirely new or unpracticed but the focus on Jesus' desire for friendship, and the calling to enter more deeply into God's Dream truly brought special clarity, direction, and depth.
God also prompted me to consider his friendship during a weekly zoom call with Jim Houston of Regent College, a 98-year-old follower of Jesus. The call is hosted by friends in other states and started this month. The whole topic is friendship with delightful stories by Jim, and commentary, and then group interaction. Another beautiful way this is of others cooperating with God, inviting me to pause and saying, "Ok, we are going deeper into this friendship thing now."
And where does Jesus emphasize the call to friendship more fully and plainly than in John 17? Although the shed blood of Jesus is offered to the whole world, it is his followers, the ones God has given him that he prays for before suffering the Cross. It is to these he has the power to give eternal life and intimacy with God the Father and God the Son. It is for these and through them, we come to know by their message. He prays each one would come to know the union that he and his Father have, and it is out of that vertical oneness that we can be one with each other horizontally. A community complete in love and unity which preaches the gospel, Jesus, to the world.
In closing, I am leaving you with my favorite poem on friendship with Christ and others. All our human friends pass on, most surely through death but also through distance, sometimes even distancing themselves. Loss. But the poem reminds us that Jesus, the Christ, is their “first, fast and last friend.” Ours too in their presence and absence and in our death. Poets say it best, I think.
The Lantern Out of Doors
Sometimes the lantern moves along the night
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think, wherefrom and bound, I wonder, where,
With all down darkness wide, his wading light.
Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mold or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.
Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.
Christ minds: Christ's interest, what to avow or amend
There eyes them, heart wants, care haunts, foot follows kind,
Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast last friend.
Gerard Manly Hopkins
I hope and pray that you have the rich beams of friends in your life, all found and kept in Christ.
I call you friends. -- Jesus
Blessings,
Trip and Laurie