What a Friend Jesus Has in You

John 15.12-17

Context is key.

The Ruler of the World now bears down upon Jesus and his disciples in the Upper Room. Caiaphas and the chief priests and Pontius Pilate are bent on destroying Jesus all because Jesus raised his friend from the tomb.

“Lazarus, come out,” Jesus summons his dead friend.

His friend who has been dead for four days.

The formerly dead friend stumbles out of the tomb in his grave clothes, his eyes wrapped shut and his feet shackled in burial linen.

“Unbind him, and let him go.”

Jesus issues the command knowing it will set in motion the plot to murder him

Christ’s raising of Lazarus from the dead, his sister Mary’s grateful response, and the plot the miracle provokes against both Jesus and Lazarus spans sixty-seven verses across chapters eleven and twelve of the Gospel of John. Not only is it the longest dramatic unit in the New Testament, it is the catalyst for Christ’s arrest and execution and it is the proximate cause Jesus now delivering his Farewell Discourse to his disciples. According to the New Testament scholar Frederick Dale Bruner, the raising of Lazarus is “the fourth gospel in miniature.” This makes it all the more surprising that the scriptures provide Lazarus absolutely no characterization.

We do not know his age or his trade. We do not know if he looked after his sisters or they looked after him. We do not know if he was faithful or righteous, a disciple or a patron. We know Martha busied herself with hospitality and was not afraid to give Jesus a piece of her mind. We know Mary sat at Jesus’ feet and attended to his teaching; we also know Mary was wealthy. But we do not know if Lazarus took after either of his sisters.

The scriptures provide Lazarus no biographical detail or adjectival attributes. We know the surrounding community from Bethany to Jerusalem knew Lazarus. There is a crowd still gathered at his grave, sitting shiva, four days later. But we do not know what they knew about him. Like us, Lazarus lived only a few miles from the nation’s capital. Did Lazarus have political convictions? Was Lazarus an ally of the administration as was Matthew the Tax Collector. Or was Lazarus, like Simon the Zealot, part of the resistance? Jesus inconveniently kept both parties in his company. His name means “God has helped,” but we do not know who God helped. We do not know anything at all about Lazarus. Except.

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The scriptures know Lazarus only as the friend whom Jesus loves.

“See how he loved him!” the crowd at the not-empty tomb whispers as Jesus weeps. And the word for love that John the Evangelist uses is phileō, not agapaō— friend-love. “Lord, he whom you love is ill,” the sisters send word to Jesus without needing to supply any other identifying information. And again, the word the sisters use is neither agape nor eros but phileō.

He whom you love as a friend is ill.

Other than his name, all we know of Lazarus is that Lazarus is Jesus’ friend.

Which, according to the Bible, is not a small thing to know about somebody.

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In the Book of Genesis, before Sin had entered into the world through the trespass at the tree, before Eve and Adam failed to trust God’s word, before Cain killed Abel, before there was any blemish from which humanity needed to be healed, God nonetheless looked upon Adam and for the first time in the scriptures pronounced an item of creation “not good.”

“It is not good that the man should be alone.”

Adam is in paradise, prior to the Fall.

And already something is not good.

Not because Adam had sinned but because Adam did not yet reflect the image of God. It was not good that Adam was alone because the LORD who made Adam is not alone. God does not endure eternity in solitude. The Triune God’s very own life is friendship: the Father loves the Son in their Spirit. The scriptures announce the fellowship from the very first chapter, “Let us make the human in our image.” God creates from a life that is already and eternally communion. We were made for one another because we were made by the God whose own Three Person’d life is with an other.

Which means the most important detail the scriptures can tell us about Lazarus is that Lazarus is the friend of Jesus.

“See how God loved him.”

Phileō.

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Lazarus was the only person Jesus called friend.

Until his final night.

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In the Upper Room, hours before he is handed over to Pontius Pilate, without an iota of earning or deserving on their part, Jesus bequeaths the same name to his disciples. And it is hardly an aside; it is the sum of this passage and an intensification of the prior promise, “I AM the vine and you are the branches.”

Philōn.

Philoi.

Philous.

Friends.

Jesus uses the word three times in six verses. It is the pulse of this passage. “No one has greater agapē,” Jesus insists about himself, “than to lay down one’s life for one’s philōn.” Jesus commands his disciples to agapē one another, but before they have performed that command a single time, before they have even attempted to obey it— much less fail to fulfill it— Jesus names them philoi.

The gift comes before the obedience. The identity is prior to the mandate. They do not love their way into friendship with Jesus. Jesus befriends them into the love he commands. Or as Jesus himself puts it, they did not choose him; he chooses them— for friendship.

“No longer do I call you servants…I call you friends.”

“You are my friends whenever you do what I command.”

And only then, “Love one another as I have loved you.”

We have so sentimentalized the Gospels that Jesus naming the eleven like Lazarus fails to land like a thunderclap as it ought.

Servant is certainly better than the other words Jesus has lobbed at his disciples; Jesus has not spent three years with them attempting to build their self-esteem. When Peter attempted to keep him from his cross, Jesus called him Satan. When they panic in a storm at sea, Jesus calls them faithless. He calls them faithless just after he calls them deaf and blind and hard of heart. When the sons of Zebedee, blinded by ambition, beseech Jesus to promote them above the others, Jesus tells them they’re out of their minds. After they fail to heal the father’s demon-possessed boy, Jesus scolds them as not only unbelieving but perverted. Whereupon Jesus laments, “How long must I put up with you!”

He is the same God unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid. He is neither naive nor unknowing. He has rebuked their fear, exposed their greed, and caught them in their prejudice. He named Judas’ treachery before Judas knew it himself. Mere moments earlier, in that very Upper Room, Jesus tells Peter that all his declarations of loyalty will collapse before the cock crows. Only one of the remaining eleven disciples will abide with him to the end so as to hear his final absolution, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” John is the only disciple who will love Jesus as Jesus commands them to love one another. Unlike Lazarus, we know far too much about these disciples.

Nevertheless!

Jesus calls each of them friend.

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It is not good that they should be alone.

So God makes them a friend.

In him.

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In just a few hours, they will all fail to keep watch over him, falling asleep in Gethsemane while he hands his terror over to the Father in prayer.

Nevertheless!

Jesus calls them friends.

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Thus their new status is sheer grace. But the gift is not inert. The name begets a future. By calling them friends, Jesus creates in them the love he commands of them. Jesus makes it explicit in the mandate itself, “Love one another as I have loved you.” The adverb translated into English with the word “as” is the Greek word kathōs. It can mean “as.” It can also mean “from.” That is, Jesus invites his friends to love one another from the love with which he loves them.

Jesus invites his friends to love one another from the love with which he loves them.

This is not simply a command.

It is a promise.

It is not an unbearably impossible law.

It is gospel.

Before Jesus tells the disciples what they must do, he reveals to them what he has done. The word works what it says. He has called them friends, and along with that new name he gifts them his love— the love that calls into existence the things that do not exist, the love which death cannot hold, the love that makes a way out of no way. This is how Jesus is the only way to the Father. He is the only way to the Father because he alone is the Father’s way to us. He is the way God comes looking for us and, finding us, calls us friends. And that name (not servant but friend) creates in them a new future obedience— a future they do not yet possess.

Peter is the clearest example. Despite thrice-denying Jesus, Peter not only stands up and finds his voice at Pentecost, he eventually lays down his life for Jesus, crucified upside down inside the Circus of Nero at Rome.

John, meanwhile, was plunged into boiling oil only to survive and die, disfigured, in exile. Andrew was crucified at Patras upon the X-shaped cross that still bears his name. Bartholomew was flayed alive before he was beheaded. Matthew who had once collected taxes for the empire died by Caesar’s sword. Doubting Thomas carried his faith in Jesus as far as the rising sun would take him, all the way to India, where he was eventually pierced with spears. Simon the Zealot was sawn in two. Jude was beaten to death in Persia for proclaiming the risen Jesus. Matthias, the replacement for Judas— like Lazarus all we know of him is that he was Christ’s friend— was stoned and then beheaded for loving Jesus as Jesus had loved him.

See how they loved him!

Every one of them who fled from Christ’s death eventually stopped running from their own. The name friend created a future they did not yet possess on Good Friday. It transfigured them into a faithfulness that otherwise has no explanation. Jesus called them what they were not yet capable of being, and because it was Jesus who called them, they became what he named them.

Peter could not lay down his life when he promised he would.

Eventually he did.

Thomas could not believe without touching the wounds.

Eventually he carried those wounds in his own body.

James and John wanted glory without the cup.

Eventually they drank it.

“No longer do I call you servants…I call you philous…Love one another as I have loved you.” And remarkably— miraculously— they did. They laid down their lives for the one who called them friend. Jesus liked them into Christ-likeness.

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Which is to say, a single word spoken by the LORD can work what it says.

One little word from Jesus can accomplish what it announces.

A promise from Christ has the power to produce the future it names.

“Lazarus, come out!”

And the dead man obeyed.

“Your sins are forgiven!”

And every last one of them are gone.

“I call you friends!”

And cowards became martyrs.

This is what a word from the LORD Jesus Christ performs. It does not merely describe reality; it creates one. It is “not fettered.” It “does not return void.” It is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.”

Which means:

When I was first diagnosed with cancer a decade ago, after my emergency surgery and first round of stage-serious chemo, I went on medical leave. To avoid becoming a distraction in my own congregation, I tried to visit other churches on Sundays— something most pastors never get to do. The lesson it taught me was sobering. I sat in wooden pews and cushioned seats and folding chairs. I worshipped in Mainline Protestant churches, in evangelical churches, and even in a small Catholic parish in the Blue Ridge Mountains. And across the spectrum, I heard sermons about current events and political issues. I heard sermons enjoining me to participate in discipleship programs, to support social justice causes, to practice various spiritual disciplines. I even heard sermons about God. I heard words about Jesus— about what Jesus said or did before he died on the cross.

Yet not in all those Sundays— never once— did I hear a single preacher summon up the eschatological nerve to speak for God. None of those preachers knew me; I was as anonymous to them as Lazarus is to us. But I thought I was dying. And when you fear your sand in the hourglass is just about up, when you are scared it might be curtains for you, there is an enormous difference— it’s the difference between death and life— between hearing something true about God and hearing a word from God.

I had neither the strength nor the headspace for causes or politics. I lacked both the patience and the interest to treat the scriptures as merely “Once upon a time in Galilee” stories. I did not need a principle for living; I needed a promise from the one who lives with death behind him. I needed to hear a prognosis my cancer could not contradict. I needed the LORD himself to declare unto me the forgiveness of my many sins. I needed Christ to promise me as he promised about the dying Lazarus, “This illness will not end in death.” I needed to hear Jesus call me, “friend.”

Sunday after Sunday, I got nothing.

I heard plenty of words.

But no one dared to hand over the goods.

And it pushed me to the precipice of despair.

I remember sitting in a Presbyterian church and thinking to myself:

“If the church cannot proclaim a word that makes the old world truly old and opens up a new future, then what— in God’s name— are we doing here?”

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Thus, the lesson I carried back from medical leave was straightforward.

There is always somebody on Sunday who has crawled over glass to get to worship. Every Sunday someone is dying. Every Sunday someone fears they are dying. Week after week, there is someone waiting on a diagnosis, someone who, like Martha and Mary, wonders where the LORD was for their loved one, someone who has been every bit as foolish or unfaithful as those in the Upper Room.

There is always a Lazarus-in-waiting. And no one can self-apply the promise. Which means I can never assume gospel. I cannot leave it implied underneath a sermon about something else. I cannot pretend what is happening somewhere else in the world is somehow more urgent than what is happening in your heart— I cannot major in the minors.

Just so—

If you are worried about Judgment Day and whether you are a sheep or a goat (and I know there is one of you), I promise you. Baptism saves. By water and the Spirit, you are home free.

For that matter, if you fret that your identity or your sexuality exclude you from this company, I have the very same promise for you. Baptism not only saves, it incorporates you into Jesus Christ himself. Whether we like it or not, we are members of one another.

If you are exhausting ChatGPT trying to figure the odds occasioned by your diagnosis, join the club and hear me. I cannot promise you it will get better, but I can promise you your illness— like every other illness— will not end in death. And if you are dying, I promise you. Patricia, you will live with death behind you.

If you are still haunted by your work exhuming the body of the baby in Kosovo with binky still strapped to her snow suit (that’s one of you), I promise you what only God can promise. One day all sad things will come untrue.

If your son no longer speaks to you, if lies sent your boy behind bars, if the wounds from your divorce still fester, if addiction still has you in its grip, if the sheer numbers at the Mission Center every week overwhelm— I do not have any solutions or advice. But I do have a promise. The future looks like this messed up world turned upside down.

I promise all of you. Not only are all your sins forgiven, you are capable of greater faithfulness than you dare imagine. Because— and only because— in the name of Jesus and by his authority alone, I call you friends.

This is Christ’s word for you today.

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So come to the table.

Friends share secrets.

Jesus gives you his very self.

Take and eat.

Taste.

And see how he loves you.

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