Spirituality – Page 9 – Salt: Seasoned Theology

¹⁴You are my friends if you do what I command you. ¹⁵I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. ¹⁶You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. ¹⁷I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. John 15:14-17

“I have called you friends,” Jesus says in John 15. With these words, Jesus announces a new way of being in community, not only with one another but also with God. Friends share plans and values with each other. Friends imagine and build relationships of trust and generous grace. Friends advocate for each other, even when the cost is giving one’s life for the other.

Jesus turns the master-slave system on its head in these verses by making a radical distinction between servanthood and friendship. The two do not exist together. True friendship where people abide in God’s love? The kind of friendship that eradicates oppression.

In these verses, Jesus crumbles hierarchies–divine and human–and “commands” those gathered around him to relate to each other as equal collaborators with God in the work of bearing fruit that lasts. And what is this lasting fruit? Destructive forms of relating to each other die on the vine while friendship–Jesus’ radical form of friendship–endures to transform the world.

Jesus’ words invite us to consider anew what it means to “friend” other people. Consider. As we “friend” people in our lives, how can we do so in such a way that we embody Jesus’ call to turn oppression on its head and give birth to communities where love flourishes?

more than friended

“like” me as you would
have me “like” you
“friend” me

“but I have called you more than friended”

not virtually—
actually
appointed
given to each other
commanded
freed
to spin tapestries
in place of enslaving webs
chosen
to birth and bear
love

Note: I am grateful to my colleague, Professor Katherine Shaner, whose New Testament scholarship has invited me to read biblical texts with new eyes. Check out her book, Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Many contemporary realities sparked this poem. Increasing homelessness in many cities. Failing churches purchased by real estate agencies and transformed into apartment buildings. Domestic violence. Nostalgia. Hope. And the awareness that human stories meet, overlap, clash, and sometimes heal.

“Don’t dwell on the past,” they said
When her fingers flew unbidden
To touch nostalgic eyes; Yes,

She would — remember — to forget —
If she could. Swipe away the wetness
Sliding down her face; worried
It might seep between her lips,
Unseal them so she breathed out
A salted stench of yesterday’s news:
“Don’t dwell on it.”

She had no dwelling anyway,
Door bolted; key flung away.
Windows boarded up. Rendered
Unfit for human habitation. Hands
curled, fists pounded, demanded entrance;
Fear said “no,” misguided sentry keeping out
Everything even shriveled up tendrils of
Purple deadnettle that trying to crawl
Through the cracks: “No-dwelling Zone.”

They moved in last Saturday, 129
U-Haul boxes crammed full of life.
“We’ll put grandma’s dining table
Here,” she said. Did she know
They would taste springtime
strawberries and snow peas there, bare
feet on the hallowed ground under that table
where a body was broken, blood poured out?

They sat, sipped grocery store wine,
Dwelling in the past.