St Barnabas 2023: Acts 11:19-end, Galatians 2:1-10 and John 15:12-17
Call to mind for a moment, if you will, one of your friends.
Perhaps it’s someone you've not seen for a while, someone you speak to regularly or someone you were close to for a particular season of life. A friend you’ve known for years or someone you’ve recently connected with.
As you call them to mind, give thanks for them - their personality or influence, kindness or wisdom. As you think of them, notice the love or encouragement you’ve received from them; what you might appreciate as a particular grace from God in them.
In his 2015 poem, ‘The Friend’ Matt Hart writes:
You put your hand on her shoulder,
or you put your hand on his shoulder.
The friend is indefinite…
… you’re talking
together about the glue of this life…
He goes on to explore this hand on shoulder way of relating in friendship: the nearness and familiarity; there in the crisis and as we recount the best of things; in the dreams and the imaginings, in faith and belief; the specific and the universal colliding and coinciding - we find, he suggests, a higher power in such a friend.
As we give thanks for the life of Barnabas the apostle today, we are drawn into a rich and enriching way of thinking about friendship.
In him, we are given an example of someone who was generous in his time, resources and judgements. Someone who was unselfish in his service to others, even or especially in the face of disagreement. Someone who was gifted with a particular grace of being able to encourage.
Thomas Aquinas regarded friendship as one of the things to be most prized and valued on earth. Such high regard comes not from the good fortune of simply being blessed by a good friend, but by the way in which God, in Jesus, relates to us as friends.
For Aquinas, human flourishing and charity could be summed up as friendship with God. This gives us a common ground and equality which opens up the possibility of freely relating to God; it also opens up the possibility of friendship with those who are different to us or with whom we disagree.
This takes us to the heart of John’s Gospel - where Jesus speaks not only of keeping God’s commandments of love, but also of abiding deeply in God’s love. Such abiding is joyous; such loving is generous.
The one who had abided close to the Father’s heart comes near to us - placing a hand on our shoulder, inviting us into a life of loving service. A life rooted in friendship with God and each other - showing honour, sharing delight, growing in wisdom, deep trust and mutual love.
This kind of friendship flows from the Father’s love for us - a love intimately involved in the whole of creation, revealed in Jesus and continued in the Spirit - a higher power of life, fullness and flourishing.
Aquinas dwells on the passage we heard today and asks: when all our Lord’s sacred discourses are full of his commandments, why does he give this special commandment respecting love, if it is not that every commandment teaches love, and all precepts are one? Yet, he goes on to note that the highest, the only proof of love, is to love our adversary…. Our Lord came to die for his enemies, but he says that he is going to lay down his life for his friends, to show that by loving we are able to gain over our enemies, so that they who persecute us are by anticipation our friends.
That sounds like a lot for us to take on - when our friendships are both close and indefinite, when our love of them forms part of the glue of life, how can we be bold enough to extend such love into the realm of disagreement?
My friend and colleague Gabby [Thomas] has reflected on this challenge in relation to areas of disagreement within the life of the church - and the calling, choice or invitation to mutual flourishing. She locates this first in God’s grace. Friendship located within God’s grace - putting friendship with God first and then friendship with the other.
Jesus says to the disciples: you did not choose me, I chose you. And perhaps it is that habit of choice that we also take into our friendships - the familiar, easy, challenging and complex. This is Gabby notes a movement towards God and others in the Holy Spirit - it does mean calling out unkind or ungenerous behaviour, as well as offering encouragement and consolation.
This kind of friendship, writes Aquinas, is: a kind of virtue in as much as it is a habit of choice.
Such habits and choices become the Spirit-infused glue of our life together. We see this in Barnabas’ life - in the risks he took, in the boundaries he crossed, in the gifts he affirmed in others and in his patient encouragement in the face of disagreement.
He is described in Acts as: a good person, filled with the Holy Spirit and faith. He was fully himself as Barnabas - created, called and chosen by God, with his own particular gifts and goodness. He was also a person of faith, open to the work of the Spirit in those daily, moment by moment choices and habits of friendship.
He was so united with the apostles in prayer, fellowship and the breaking of bread, that he gave all that he was and all that he had to support the church. Personally, this meant selling a field and giving the proceeds to the apostles to build up the community and strengthen or sustain their witness. Collectively, it meant as we hear Paul recount in Galatians, that within the economy of grace and friendship, the poor were never forgotten.
We see the habits of generosity and encouragement in his dealings with others - with friends within the fellowship of Jesus.
He gave the younger man Mark a second chance - making allowances for youthful energy and enthusiasm. He was a wise elder, taking time to understand and giving him space to grow in maturity. He consoled, encouraged and supported him.
He gave the older man Paul a chance too - being generous in his judgement of him, based on his own values rather than the opinions and fears of others. With Paul in particular, he not only rejoices in the grace and gifts of others, but committed to the work of building up Christian community and shared ministry. He was reliable, compassionate and kind over the year they spent together.
It was in Antioch that we see Paul and Barnabas reaching across theological divides and disagreements; bridging Jewish and Gentile communities, building trust and loyalty, collaborating with patience and enthusiasm. Together, they listened to the prompting of the Spirit as they faced the struggles of the present - attentive both to the legacy of the past and the hopes for the future.
Barnabus in particular connects Jerusalem and Antioch in himself - in his friendships and loyalties, bound together as bodies within the Body of Christ. Through the one Spirit, two peoples and communities are drawn into a shared life. In friendships forged across differences, a new reality is made possible.
Such friendship was not about being like-minded but the choice to spend time together and to find in that the gift of mutual flourishing. The commitment to friendship in community was a conviction of both heart and mind - building bonds of trust and offering time and money to that work. Their collaboration, their friendship, begins to remake the world.
Friendship is a way of holiness - habits, choices, practices which draw us more deeply into the life of God for the sake of the world. Such friendship embodies the depth of God’s love, the life and teaching of Jesus and the vitality of the Spirit, breath by breath.
As friends, hands are raised in signs of forgiveness and blessing - tracing the cross in bodies and in air; the hands we extend towards each other also reach out to receive Christ Jesus in the gift of the sacrament. Friendships may be indefinite, but here we are talking together about the glue of this life…
The glue of God’s love mediated friendship with Jesus; the glue of the life-giving Spirit sculpting and reforming. In worship we attend to the dazzling brightness of such love; in the world, we are involved in responding to human need, to those places of loving concern, human and divine.
In that task, may we be friends: united in prayer and the breaking of bread; generous in judgement and service; encouraging and building up; choosing those habits of goodness and kindness. All this, in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Spirit.
(C) Julie Gittoes 2023
