Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
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Most people think of celibacy only in the negative. You’re giving up sexual contact with others. You’re giving up marriage and family. Or even worse—you’re suppressing this natural and beautiful part of your humanity. At the most superficial level, this understanding is accurate. You are giving up something—many somethings, in fact—when you live into a call to consecrated celibate chastity. But for those whom God truly calls to that life, celibacy is a doorway joy and depth and ever-expanding love.
The celibate life, lived with integrity, is not so different from a sacramental marriage. By limiting our expression of our sexuality, we allow God to expand our capacity to love and be loved. If it’s the life you’re called to—and that’s the key right there—you can fall in love with God in every person, every glint of sunlight off the water, every beat of the crow’s wing.
One of the greatest gifts of celibacy for me has been the discovery of the joys of true and deep friendship. When we speak of love and relationship, we are almost always talking about sexual or romantic connection. But deep, true, and abiding love flowers in many other fields, if we let it.
In this morning’s gospel reading—which my friend Suzanne calls lovey dovey Sunday—Jesus invites his disciples and us into a different kind of relationship with God than we are accustomed to. “You are my friends,” he tells them. Then he emphasizes that this move to friendship is a marked change in his relationship with them. “I do not call you servants any longer; […] but I have called you friends.”
This shift should shock us. At the very least, it should cause us to stop and wonder and question.
Throughout the synoptic gospels and in the earlier parts of John, Jesus offers many different images for the relationship with God. God is a forgiving father running into a field to meet us or a mother hen protecting her flock. Jesus is the bridegroom, the lover who pursues us, woos us, weds us. God is the master or lord challenging us to obedience, patience, and service. Jesus is the teacher opening the way to wisdom and self-abandonment. But here Jesus calls us his friends.
Until this moment, each relational image that Jesus uses is hierarchical. If God is our mother, we are children. If Jesus is our teacher, we are students. If God is our master, we are servants. Our tradition has used these same power-differentiated images of God almost exclusively. There is certainly a value and truth in these images. After all, we are not God. We are limited human creatures.
And yet this morning Jesus says to his disciples and to us, “I do not call you servants any longer, but I have called you my friends.” True friendship is not power-differentiated. True friendship is mutual, egalitarian, horizontal. Not only does Jesus tell us that this kind of mutual, equal relationship is available to us, but he tells that friendship—not parental love, not romantic love, not the loving bond of teacher and student—friendship is the truest and deepest love. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” It is through friendship that we most fully know and love Jesus and that we fulfill his commandment to love one another.
The Rule of the Society of St. John the Evangelist has a beautiful chapter on the graces of friendship:
“For us no honor exists that could be greater than Jesus calling us his friends. The more we enter into the fullness of our friendship with him, the more he will move us to be friends for one another, and to cherish friendship itself as a means of grace. The forging of bonds between us that would make us ready to lay down our lives for one another is a powerful witness to the reality of our risen life in Christ. In an alienating world, where so many are frustrated and wounded in their quest for intimacy, we can bear life-giving testimony to the graces of friendship as men who know by experience its demands, its limitations and its rewards.”
Our world certainly is alienating. So many are frustrated and wounded in their quest for intimacy. So many are abused by parents and lovers and masters and teachers. Jesus offers those of us who have been so wounded a different way to know him and love him and one another: the way of friendship.
I believe one of the reasons we often have such an anemic understanding of friendship is that true friendship—with God and one another—requires total vulnerability. To share one’s soul with another can be frightening. It can and does open us to betrayal. Jesus knew this, of course. Still, he chose to call his disciples friends the same night that they would leave him, deny him, and hand him over. Still, he returned to them, laid himself bare for them again, and showed them the way of forgiveness and healing.
To lay down one’s life for one’s friends does only mean to accept physical death on their behalf. Mostly it means to be willing to lay oneself bare, to stand wide open to the possibility of betrayal and abandonment and to choose to love anyway. Cynthia Bourgeault writes that “self-emptying is at the same time self-disclosure.” To offer the gift of one’s true self and to accept another’s gift of self is what it means to abide in and with God and one another.
This is the way Jesus calls us to love him. This is the way Jesus calls us to love each other. Without power over, without manipulation, without hiding or shame. Freely. Vulnerably. Nakedly ourselves.
And because you know I have to say it: What a friend we have in Jesus! Amen.
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