The Mind of Christ
1993 (Year B), 8 August / Pentecost 10
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
When we were young most of us had a special friend. Of course it wasn’t always the same person. We’d fall in and out of friendships. But while it lasted those relationships had a special quality. We did the same things, played the same games, went to the same places, wore the same clothes. Supported each other if we got into trouble. We remember the times fondly. They were times when we could almost see right into each other’s heads. Often we didn’t have to talk to communicate; we’d know what each other was thinking or what we wanted. Of course it’s not always like that. It can seem to parents at least, that young people have far too much to say to each other, particularly when they want to use the phone.
The things we experienced as children continue now with those we love or are close to. There will’ve be times in your lives when you’ve sat with somebody and at the same time each said exactly the same thing. They’ll do the needful, magically, without being asked. Other times you’ve known precisely what they were thinking or how they were feeling. More irritating times are the ones when the other person completes the sentence for you, but perhaps that only happens as we get older. We can do all these things because we’re practised at it. We’re skilled. Because we’re friends and we love each other.
With others; people we know less well, it’s all much harder. We don’t know their ways or how their minds work and so they surprise us. We feel less at ease and it’s much more effort. When people who are not friends come together they need rules to help them get along. Even then, people who are different from one another often split apart; men with men, women with women, young people with young people, white with white, black with black. It seems to make it easier.
It’s always been the same. When Jesus was invited to a Pharisee’s house the likelihood was that he wasn’t a particularly close friend. He went anyway. And he knew the rules so he knew where to sit and, presumably, how to behave. And the rules were quite formal. They prescribed not only where you sat, what you said, what you wore, how you prepared for the meal but who you spoke to and sat next to and you certainly didn’t have a woman who had a bad name touching you. Just like today really.
Although the rules were very detailed and had things to say about how you should behave in all kinds of relationships they clearly didn’t apply in the relationships Jesus sort with his disciples. When he was with them he was constantly turning accepted rules upside down. He washed them when he wasn’t supposed to. He sat and ate with those he was not supposed to be with, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard’, they said, ‘a mend of tax collectors and sinners’. He helped people, often at the wrong times, and seemed to praise those who did so at inconvenient ones. The parable which Luke adds to the end of the Lord’s Prayer tells of a request for bread at an incredibly inconvenient time. The man gets out of bed because he cannot ignore the urgency of the request.
In Jesus’ mind something else, something more important, than the accepted way of behaving shaped his relationships. According to St Paul the divisions which traditionally separate us and help define behaviour, gender, race, class, servant – master are now no longer operative. A new more radical relationship exists between us which opens up all kinds of possibilities.
Jesus himself made it clear what it is. He said, ‘I shall not call you servants anymore, because a servant does not know his masters business; I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have learnt from my Father’. Friends. We are called friends by God. And friendship is the relationship that the divine seeks with us.
Friendship combines affection with faithfulness. You can depend on a friend. Between friends the only rule is the promise to walk with each other and be there for each other. When people sought to condemn Jesus by contemptuously calling him a ‘friend of sinners and tax – collectors’, they were, unknown to themselves, expressing a profound truth. God is precisely that which all people, no matter what they are can rely on for affection and faithfulness.
In the mind of Christ we are now his friends. We are people known intimately by him and loved by him. Because we are his friends a new relationship exists between each of us. We are friends. This all has tremendous implications for us as a church. Just think of them. What would it really be like if Christian congregations and communities were no longer to regard themselves as simply the ‘community of the saints’, or as ‘congregation of the faithful’, but rather, because of our relationship with Jesus as ‘a community of friends’. I think it would transform us. We would have to overcome the disconnectedness amongst ourselves and make it possible for each of us to feel at home and accepted here. We would have to break through the barriers of exclusivity which divide us from each other. For friendship transfigures an often otherwise unpleasant world. It prepares the ground for a friendlier world. It is a blessing, a foretaste of the Kingdom. AMEN