6 Easter B May 5,2024
Acts 10:44-48 Ps. 33:1-8,18-22
1 John 4:7-21 John 15:9-17
In the passing of time, we re-contextual the inherited traces of what has gone before. And this is what we do with the biblical readings, just as the biblical readings themselves were at one time the musings of writers who re-presented and re-contextualized the traces of what they had received in the available traditions to them at the time of their writing.
As we re-contextualize the reading from the Gospel of John today, we must be honest about the great differences in our context today from the context of the Johannine community or communities in which the writings were generated some 6 or 7 decades after Jesus lived in perhaps communities distant from Galilee and Jerusalem.
The Gospels themselves are re-contextualized writings, presenting the writers' experience of the Risen Christ within a narrative account of Jesus of Nazareth, even assuming the voice of an oracle of Christ in speaking and writing in the name of Jesus.
The reading from our appointed Gospel provides us the occasion to reflect upon a comparison of the notion of neighbor and friend.
All neighbors are not friends. All friends are not neighbors, in the sense of having continual physical proximity.
What might be the meanings of the love injunctions regarding neighbors and friends?
We are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Are we supposed to lay down our lives for our neighbors? It does happen. Heroes often die for people they don't know personally in battle, or in a rescue from a dangerous situation.
I think the notion of neighborly love and the friendship love referred to in John's Gospel evokes some context specific features of the Johannine community of the writer.
That community was a social gathering with an identity which centered around the mystical experience that persons had with the Risen Christ. It was a community which existed with neighbors who were not privy to that experience. Such a mystical experience gave a certain exclusiveness to this community. Christians and Jews believed in an exclusive devotion to one God, whereas their neighbors within the cities of the Roman Empire held to the belief in many various gods and goddesses coupled with a required belief in a deified Emperor. How does a community which requires exclusive devotion to One God, One Christ, fit into a situation that tolerates the beliefs in all the gods and goddesses as long as it is coupled with participation in the cult of the Emperor?
I hope we can appreciate how there arose the notional differences of neighbor and friend. Long before the Quakers borrowed the term "Friends" as a preferred designation of their community, the Johannine community understood the contextual difference between neighbor and friend.
The early Christians were neighbors with everyone, but they were friends with the ones with whom they shared the intimacy of the mystical experience of knowing the Risen Christ.
As friends, they knew that their identity most often was not something widely shared with their neighbors living in the cities of the Roman Empire. But as friends in their situations of potential exigent persecution, they knew that they might be brought to the situation which required them to lay down their physical lives for each other.
We who have lived in situations of such freedom of religious practice, perhaps cannot appreciate fully the context of this early community of friends, who had been made into such a friendship group by sharing an experience of the Risen Christ.
The Johannine community needed to be founded in friendship with Christ to help each other in their minority status within the Roman Empire. And the notion of laying down of one's life for one's friend is also an internal dynamic of the fellowship of Christ. The fellowship of Christ survives internally because friendship requires the continual practice of laying down of one's life for each other. The New Testament Greek word for life here is pseuche or soul life. In this sense, friendship requires the continual checking of the ego at the door, so as to make room for each other to have dignity and respect within the community.
If we look at the history of the Christian church, much of it has been about requiring many members of the church to lay down their lives for the authority and power of men, especially the men who have had the power to define what dignity and participation within community means.
Today, we are called to re-contextualize what friends in Christ means for us. It means a radical inclusive community for persons who have been heretofore marginalized both within the church and within societies where our churches find themselves.
Friendship does not mean being but passive neighbors for whom the laws of our society require a live and let live attitude even while letting active and passive biases and discriminative practices occur. The laying down of one's life for friendship today requires celebrating the equality that has occurred because of the image of God on each person's life and because of the accessible experience of the presence of the Risen Christ to actualize that image of God in a particular way within the Christian fellowship.
Let us explore the fellowship of friendship today and create communities of radical welcome for all. This is the friendship that Christ calls us to today. Amen.
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