The Bible and Friendship: Ely Cathedral Lecture for 400th Anniversary of KJV
Bishop Stephen Conway
The invitation from Alan Hargrave to submit a title and then deliver a lecture on the Bible in my first year was very welcome. Like many of you, I expect, I have been involved in a variety of celebrations of the Bible in its King James translation, including marathon readings, one of which was virtual on video. I am delighted to be here in person with you.
Choosing the theme of friendship was not entirely arbitrary on my part. Friendship is a regular theme in the popular presentation of philosophy at the moment. Aristotle wrote extensively on the subject and many modern philosophers develop their theories from the starting point of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII. He identifies three patterns of deep feeling and regard for others: eros, philia and agape.
Eros we know to represent passion which is expressed sexually, or is recognised to have a very direct element of physical yearning about it. Philia is most akin to what I would say is the feeling which binds most friendship because it is the level of regard which would also express close family ties and non-erotic intimacy of affection. Aristotle claimed that loving friendship is based upon three things at root: pleasure, utility and virtue. It seems to me that friendship just based on the pleasure I gain from a particular person, or her social or economic usefulness to me is at odds with the basis of philia as love and intimacy of affection and would create only instrumental acquaintanceships. The only true combination would seem to be of philia and virtue – one is drawn to another person by his virtue or strength/integrity of character. Although we might love people in spite of their weaknesses because we have a passionate attraction or longing to protect them, we are at our best in mutual friendship where we admire our friends and are drawn to them by the value of their conversation, their commitment to truth. Our best friends, said Oscar Wilde, stab us in the front. In the Christian tradition, agape has come to represent a selfless love which does not depend upon the qualities or the value of the loved one. This is usually interpreted as the way in which God loves us regardless of sin, the way in which we love God but cannot add or subtract from him; and the way in which we reflect God’s unselfish love in our love for the world and for humanity without expecting anything in return.
It has been an interesting exercise to google Christian friendship on the worldwide web. It most commonly brings up Christian dating sites. One would hope that all three strands of eros, philia and agape might meet in the meeting of subscribers. Christian interpretation of Scripture has traditionally had some difficulty with this combination, most beautifully illustrated by approaches to The Song of Songs. The text is meant to be treated at a number of levels, including the spiritual. St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote and delivered 86 sermons on The Song of Songs because he believed that the poetry expressed most profoundly the spiritual marriage between the soul and Christ. It was impossible to imagine that it was quite erotic love poetry for tender lovers who also love the love in each other. Bernard entirely approved of the idea that Love brings love into being, but only free of carnality, by which he would mean not just sex but a fleshly rather than mystical life. You can see why he persecuted Peter Abelard as a more earth-bound rationalist as well as for his love for Heloise. This was brought home rather personally for me by the fact that a rather scary nun I know wrote a thesis about the interpretation of The Song of Songs which proved definitively that Bernard was absolutely right – no sex, please, we’re mystics. I still find it hard to contradict Sister, even though I believe that sexual desire and friendship in The Song are not incompatible with the allegory of mystical union. The Bible should communicate to us at every level the whole of our life as human beings created in God’s image to be loved by Him so completely that we long in love for the image of God in each one of us.
Along with senior colleagues, I have spent many mornings this year in church schools leading collective worship in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. This has involved reading Ephesians 3.13-19:
Wherefore I desire that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which is your glory. For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ might dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.
Seeking to express growing into that fullness visually, I have usually asked the youngest child present to join me at the front, both to observe a certain contrast and also to prove that (s)he can jump as high as I can and can also, funnily enough, take as big a step as I can. There is growing to do, but the potential is all there to experience the wide ground of God’s abundant life and mercy. Living abundantly is at the root of what friendship is about. Jesus tells us that he came that we might have life, and live it to the full. As Ephesians continues in Chapter Four, we see this abundance lived out ‘as we have learned Christ’ and are formed into holy and entirely reciprocal community.
I am reassured that relatively modern statements on friendship compare well with our Christian experience. Albert Camus wrote: ‘Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.’ Perhaps Camus was a rather wayward friend; but Jesus Christ is the one who walks beside us and calls his disciples his friends. The novelist, George Eliot, wrote: ‘Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person! Having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out just as they are, chaff and grain together. Certain that a faithful hand will take them and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.’ This has echoes of Romans 8, with the Holy Spirit of God taking our groaning to the Father and praying in us, however paltry and misguided our prayers might be. The former Primate of the Episcopal Church in the United States, Bishop Frank Griswold once said in a sermon in York Minister that he went on retreat in order to prepare himself to make his confession to his spiritual director. He believed that his preparation was the best he had ever made. He was really pleased with the degree of self-examination and rigorous delineation of sin. When he told his director this, he had to repent of his ridiculous pride before they could proceed. Desiring to be simple is much more deep a gift than being fascinated by one’s own complexity. Such self-regard rarely aids friendship.
It is difficult to discover the whole motivation behind the decision of the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 to translate the Bible, especially because it was not originally on the agenda at all. Dr Reynolds’ insistence that a translation be undertaken because of corrupt earlier texts in English, like the Great Bible was only one part of it – generally denied in the original preface, anyway. There was a desire for uniformity and clarity, of course. The involvement of controversialists like Lancelot Andrewes who regularly disputed theology with Roman Catholic prisoners kept at the Bishop’s Palace at Wisbech Castle, might suggest that a clean English text would help in debates about fundamentals or faith and grace. Most important, however, was the desire to provide the best and most reliable translation which God’s people would hear daily, even if they could not read. How could anyone be God’s friend if they could not understand the Bible in their own, contemporary, language? The King James Bible is still the most read version of the Bible in English. Many Christians would be horrified to read any other version of the text. We know it is wonderful, that it is more anchored in the development of English vocabulary even than Shakespeare and Chaucer. It is most wonderful that it is still read because it applied the best scholarship in theology and ancient languages and their lexicography which was available, combined with the prose power of preachers like Andrewes, in order to have the kind of worshipful and cultural reach that contemporary translations aimed at teenagers can only dream of. It is in the English that people either already spoke or were being formed by the use of the language to speak. I tend to dream in the language of Common Worship - isn’t that sad? From very soon after 1611 if not in the year of publication itself, people were dreaming in the language of the King James Bible which they read or had read to them and which they heard preached from. This carries the beautiful cadences now of the everyday world then, where friendship and all close human relationships were and are formed.
This is quite a frightening realisation, however. If the intention of Andrewes and his fellow translators was to bring the Bible closer to God’s friends, accountability has come much closer. Like other preachers, I have spoken often about Jesus being our friend; but what is the basis for this? On closer inspection, is friendship with God the kind of friendship to which any but the most daring would aspire? We need to look closer, and I have been helped in this by the chapter on friendship in the book, Christ of the Everyday by a former colleague of mine, Professor Jeff Astley. He takes the view that friendship is ‘a high and holy calling’ which in its real form is only possible with a few people. It accommodates sincerity, honesty, room for disagreement and differences of view. The word disinterested is the term which best describes this, because it expresses the notion of valuing friends for their own sake. He argues that this is a useful analogy for belief in God, not just a good thing but a good thing without which no other good is possible. This is the foundation of human creation in Genesis. God does not need anything in order to be God, in the perfect friendship of the Trinity. But we are given the picture of God tenderly walking in the garden, calling for those whom he had fashioned out of Love for love. The story bears the burden of our understanding that we were made for the kind of union with God which mystics like Bernard proclaim and seek. It was ours but we wilfully sought an instrumental relationship with God, where some of the power came our way. We deserved in Adam to be lost, but – as the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer in the new Roman Missal states – ‘And when through disobedience he had lost your friendship, you did not abandon him to the domain of death. For you came in mercy to the aid of all, so that those who seek you might find you.’
Astley quotes one commentator who says that friendship is ‘fundamentally alien to the Old Testament world’. I wonder which version of the Hebrew Scriptures he was reading. In Exodus 33.11 ‘The Lord would speak face to face with Moses as a man speaks with his friend.’ In 2 Chronicles 20:7 Abraham is described as God’s friend by Jehosophat: and in Isaiah 41:8 the Lord himself refers to his friend Abraham, father of his descendant Israel and Jacob. The Books of Proverbs and of Wisdom also relates how divine wisdom works to build friendship with God. Proverbs 18.24 states that ‘Some companions are good only for idle talk, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.’ Wisdom 7 says: ‘In all ages entering into holy souls, [wisdom] makes them friends of God and prophets.’
The Book of Proverbs says many positive things about friendship, not least about how friendship is measured in constancy – as in Proverbs 17:7, 18:24 and 27:10.We see that constancy revealed in the famous examples of personal friendships between Naomi and Ruth and David and Jonathan. The friendship of the women defied tribe and borders and that between David and Jonathan defied family loyalties and parental authority. Given the power of the clan and family in that society, as in many societies around the world today, these friendships are extremely striking. However, there are plenty of examples of friendship going awry. The friends of Job are not helpful, indeed quite the reverse. Psalm 41:9 alludes to betrayers of friendship. In the Book of Proverbs there is the acknowledgement that time-servers seek out the rich and the famous for friendship as a stepping-stone to power and influence and/or money and information. We can all think of examples of this from history, from the movies or from what we have observed. I can think of situations in which I have wondered how a particular person could possibly be regarded as a friend by somebody in a prominent position. The reason is that such people, married or not, can be quite lonely and others exploit the space created by the real friends of that person who hold back rather than be seen to benefit from a relationship which for them is about philia, about intimacy of affection and regard for its own sake. The prophet Micah talks of the desperate time when friends and lovers cannot be trusted (Micah 7:5). The sons of Zebedee, egged on by their ambitious mother, wanted to sit on the right and left of Jesus in his kingdom. They wanted the instrumental benefits, the ultimate utility of their friendship with Jesus. His response is to ask them whether they can drink from the cup of suffering from which he will drink which rather shuts them up. What they do not realise yet is that by being those gathered at the Last Supper with him in the Upper Room they have come to the moment of choice – his choice of all of them and their decision to follow him, even after running away. They are friends to be taken, blessed and broken in order to be handed out for the world’s sake for the mission of God.
It is fascinating that Jesus calls Judas ‘friend’ in Matthew 26:50 at the time of his betrayal. This is not an ironic usage. Friends are capable of disloyalty and betrayal, with terrible consequences, but in the mind of the person betrayed the reality of the friendship itself is ineradicable. The penitent thief on the Cross beside Jesus is afforded the reconciliation which Jesus might have offered a penitent Judas. There is that extraordinary scene at the end of Angels with Dirty Faces where the priest goes to the cell of his condemned gangster friend, played by James Cagney. The Cagney character is a murderer but one whose image is magnetic for a group of street kids who could go either way. The priest will be Cagney’s friend through to his terrible execution and beyond. There is no condition attached to it; but he asks Cagney to die a coward and not the defiant tough guy for the sake of these boys. Cagney has nothing left apparently but his bravado. But he has the courage to die a coward for friendship.
Jesus specialises in unworthy friends. He calls his ‘little ones’, not just urchin children whom the disciples want to keep at bay, but the adult little ones whose treatment by the religious authorities like the Pharisees made him so angry – these whited sepulchres who put greater and greater religious and ritual burdens on the poor who cannot be good Jews because they have no water for ritual washing and have no choice but to eat forbidden foods or starve. I have been saying that our common life in the Diocese needs to be rooted in prayer and parties. Jesus was a real party-goer, sitting down to eat with tax collectors and sinners, having his feet washed by a woman who was damaged goods. He forgave them their sins and they went away in peace. The woman in Luke 7 gate-crashed a party and left through the open door of the kingdom of God. God’s friendship with the poor and oppressed is undeniable, no matter what the people with power say. The recent survey of social attitudes has been exercising those of us who are appalled that people are becoming less tolerant of poor people, more likely to blame them just for being lazy, wanting to reduce unemployment benefits. We seem to be rolling back the consensus of the post-War world. People are not much interested in the paradox that the poor are blessed. Luke’s Sermon on the Plain does not spiritualise Jesus’s beatitude, ‘Blessed are the poor’. When John’s disciples ask Jesus whether he is the one expected, he replies with a list of wonders.The crescendo of the list is that the poor have good news preached to them.
In the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century, the Jesuits completely bought into the idea, later promoted by Rousseau and other philosophers of the Enlightenment, of the noble savage, the natural man so untouched by the corruption of civilisation that a natural and simple friendship might exist more easily for them with God. In Patagonia they experimented with this model. It was furiously opposed by landowners who wished to exploit native peoples as slave labour. This is beautifully and horribly rendered in the film of Robert Bolt’s play, The Mission. After the Jesuits brought the Indians to faith and to Mozart, the landowners got their way with the connivance of a cardinal. As the cardinal lived with his regrets, an aide tried to comfort him by saying that this was just how the world is. ‘No’, said the cardinal without self-pity. ‘This is how we have made the world.’ What lies we tell ourselves and others to protect the things that separate us from God. Jesus longed to be friends with the rich young man; but he went away troubled because of his many possessions. The party of the kingdom is full of surprises. I once attended the funeral of a distinguished scholar in Durham Cathedral. The Dean averred that the congregation was a foretaste of the banquet in the kingdom of heaven because there were all sorts of people present who would never have expected to meet there. Friendship with God is subversive of what we presume about the world.
My own expectations were thrown into some confusion when I was called to be Bishop of Ely. This became very concrete for me when I had to undergo an arcane legal ceremony in the Church of St Mary-le-Bow in the City of London which confirmed my election in much the same way as my predecessors were confirmed centuries before me. Archbishop Rowan takes this very seriously and not only attends but takes the opportunity to issue the charge to which the new bishop’s ministry is meant to respond. He took a passage of the Bible which I had chosen and spoke to me about it directly, eye-to-eye. I chose John 15:15-17,
‘No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is about. I have called you friends, because I have disclosed to you everything that I heard from my Father. You did not choose me: I chose you. I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last; so that the Father may give you whatever you ask in my name. This is my commandment to you: love one another.’
The Archbishop spoke about friendship at a number of levels. He spoke of what he saw as my gift for friendship into which he has personal insight and observation. What he went on to talk about more generally was the responsibility and expectation of friendship. Once named a friend, you cannot go back. Much of the time this will be exhilarating and rewarding and everybody involved in the friendship grows. But friendship can be tough, if the inspirational friend makes demands like ‘Follow me’. Models of this kind of friendship he drew out of Paul’s letters. At one time, Paul is sending demanding instructions to Timothy and others, even down to picking up his discarded clothes. He seems to fix on Priscilla and Aquila, and yet they seem to come to love him and volunteer to work with him. He names a list of valued individuals at the end of the Letter to the Romans. The followers who see him off to Rome near the end of Acts (Chapter 20) were grieved because they knew they would never see his face again. The overriding message of Archbishop Rowan’s homily was very positive – celebrating a new beginning for people who would be drawn into a real ‘partnership in the Gospel’ and a very personal bond, too. Slaves do not know their master’s business. Friends do.
The history of salvation carried in the Old Testament is a constantly recurring story of the invitation into covenant friendship with God against which the Israelites rebel and are called to repentance and are offered a heart of flesh rather than a heart of stone. They are promised redemption and the closest relationship imaginable with the Father; but nothing will do until the Son of God stoops to reign so that we can be co-heirs with him, our pioneer. The one who declares the disciples friends, is the Lord who has just washed their feet. Few had sought friendship with God until Jesus redefined friendship by saying in John 15:13, ‘No one has greater love than this, that he lays down his life for his friends.’ The Son of God will die so that the intimacy of friendship which God had with Adam and Eve in the garden could be restored in the new creation brought in by his resurrection from the dead.
Jesus revealed his full humanity in his having particular friends, like Lazarus and his sisters at Bethany and the Beloved disciple whom Jesus loved in a way that distinguished him among Jesus’s chosen friends, the other apostles. We live the scandal of particularity by which Jesus’s whole ministry was spent in a small area of the Middle East and he spoke directly to only a fraction of the population of Judaea and Galilee and chose twelve apostles and a small circle of women. We see it further in his having unique friendships where it was no one else’s business what he had planned for them, as Peter found out when he asked the Risen Lord what would happen to the Beloved Disciple in John 21:21. It’s none of your business. You follow me as you; that is enough to concentrate on. The Risen Lord, revealed in his divine glory, had revealed himself to Peter, with James and John on the mountain top, before the final denouement in Jerusalem. It was a direct consequence of being among the first to respond to the call, ‘Follow me and I shall make you fishers of men.’ Getting the following right was a problem for Peter. He intuitively knew who Jesus was but could not join it all up. His faith was the rock upon which the Church would be built; but he betrays Jesus three times. What kind of friend is that? The wonderful climax to our biblical story of friendship is that God refuses to give up on the material he has got to build friendship.
As the Early fathers understood as they reflected spiritually on Aristotle and sought to address the invitation to friendship with God, they were inspired by agape as the way to describe the wholly non-utilitarian friendship which God offers entirely from his own will and not depending upon any merit in the beloved or even any response. It is no surprise, then, that Peter is restored to friendship with God on a beach after breakfast. Jesus says to Peter (John 21:15-17),’‘Simon son of John, do you love me more than these others?’ ‘Yes, Lord,’ he answered. ‘You know I love you.’ ‘Then feed my lambs,’ he said. A second time he asked, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’ ‘Yes, Lord, you know I love you.’ ‘Then tend my sheep.’ A third time he said, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me? Peter was hurt that he asked him a third time, ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘you know everything; you know I love you.’ Jesus said, ‘Then feed my sheep.’’
The exchange makes fullest sense in the Greek. In the first two exchanges, Jesus uses agape for love. He asks Peter if he loves him in the wholly committed way that God loves us, in a class beyond the capability of the other disciples. Peter does not understand what Jesus is getting at and on both occasions uses philia. His response to the invitation to love with the fullness of God’s love is to reply that he’ll actually love like a good chum or cousin. In the third exchange, Jesus switches himself to philia. This is where Peter has got to. The Risen Christ will always move towards us across the ground of our misunderstanding and failure to commit. Even though Peter still does not quite get it, the restoring invitation is repeated in each exchange. Peter is transformed from betrayer into a renewed apostle with a specific and unique charge which will bring him to his own cross. He is charged with the care of first ‘little lambs’ and then ‘little sheep’, alluding to the figurative use of sheep and the Good Shepherd in Chapter 10. He has received the commission to do the will of his friend and is loved with an everlasting love, just like us.
Bishop Stephen