“You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.”
In friendship, when one friend withholds essential truth from the other, it enslaves the other to a false image. How can the friends really know and love each other if the basis of the relationship is founded on falsehood? Jesus calls his disciples friends because he has told them everything he heard from his Father. In Jesus’ sharing this, the disciples are free in Jesus’ authentic gift of self to them.
God, help me understand that Jesus also calls me into friendship with him—a more trusting friendship than I could possibly imagine. But time after time, I fail to take him up on the invitation; for that reason, like the disciples, it is not I who choose him but he who chooses me. Time after time after time, Jesus chooses me, like Francis Thompson’s character in the poem “The Hound of Heaven”: I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways / Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears / I hid from Him, and under running laughter. / Up vistaed hopes I sped.”
Many plans for today pull me in so many directions I feel like I will tear apart. Jesus says in today’s Gospel reading, “go and bear fruit that will remain.” I ask for God’s grace to know which ways to go today that will keep me in friendship with his Son.
Today I want to slow down and ask myself where I am going and why in such a hurry. Will I look at another and see this as an opportunity to hear the Father and remain in his love through seeing Christ in others?