In Gail R. O’Day’s article titled I Have Called You Friends, she writes about the subject of friendship. She notes two dimensions of friendship in antiquity that can help us make sense of Jesus’ understanding of friendship—
“the gift of one’s life for one’s friends and the
use of frank and open speech, (both) informed the way that the Gospel of John and its readers understood language about friendship.”
She goes on to say that “the Christian vocation is to give love freely and generously without counting the cost or wondering and worrying about who is on the receiving end of our limitless love…. Jesus gave everything to his friends—his knowledge of God and his own
life. Jesus is our model for friendship—because he loved without limits—and he makes it possible for us to live a life of friendship because we have been transformed by everything he shared with us. Through friendship we come to know God and through friendship we enact the love of God. We
can risk being friends because Jesus has been a friend to us.”
If our beginning assumption is that Jesus makes such friendship conditional, that Jesus withholds friendship from some on the basis of those conditions, that Jesus chooses some to be friends while discarding the rest, then we are seriously missing a key aspect of who God is.
When Jesus says in John 15:12, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command”, He is not limiting the scope of His friendship towards us, He is attaching our actions and words- our willingness to be a friend to God- to the command to love. The quesion at hand is whether we are being a friend to God by loving each other.
To say to someone, we cannot be friends or you are not my friends or I am not interested in friendship with you, is to instead call that person my enemy. And if we are to take the above verse seriously, this is akin to saying to God, you, then, are my enemy.
Jesus’ love has no bounds, no limits. Jesus does not make friendship conditional, He makes it necessary. More than this, He embodies it in His death and resurrection. We are, each of us, called to walk the same path without condition.
The Stories of my Life 