I wonder if you’ve read C. S. Lewis’ The Four Loves? If you haven’t, you’ve got a treat to enjoy sometime. His chapter on friendship is a favourite of mine. It’s an insight-packed paean to friendship. And friendship is a vital part of our life together in Christ, a foretaste of what is to come.
A friendship is not the same thing as an exclusive coterie or cabal. “True Friendship,” says Lewis, “is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend.” The foundation for friendship, Lewis says, is companionship, which is what we often mean by the term “fellowship”. Companionship entails a basic willingness to get on and work well with others.
Friendship is more
Companionship is a necessary starting point. But that’s still not quite friendship. “Friendship,” Lewis adds, “arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest.” In other words, it takes shared interest to create the friendship. The one enables the other.
Then, Lewis goes on to see what this friendship is that shared interest has created. And he argues that friends are not just allies; they’re not just useful when the times are tough. That is, friendship is not a means to an end but an end, a value, in itself – something which enriches our humanity. The common quest or vision which unites the friends has not absorbed them in such a way that they remain ignorant or oblivious of one another. Through their common vision, they become blessed with an affection for each other.
You see this, for example, in the friendship of John Newton and William Cowper. They found their friendship in their shared desire to produce hymns for the church. But that shared quest brought something more. Here were two quite broken men – Newton with a painful past, Cowper with his depression – supporting each other personally, protecting each other, and bringing the best out of each other.
That’s the wonder of friendship: it opens our eyes to know another and so to appreciate them as themselves. We see behind their role and their potential usefulness: we see them, and begin to sympathise with their weaknesses and esteem them for their qualities.
It is for us in our friendships as it was for Christiana and her party in The Pilgrim’s Progress: “They seemed to be a terror one to the other, for that they could not see that glory each one on herself which they could see in each other. Now therefore they began to esteem each other better than themselves. For you are fairer than I am, said one; and you are more comely than I am, said another.”
This isn’t politeness or flattery: friendship opens our eyes to the qualities and beauties in our friends.
Paul’s passionate plea
At the end of the first chapter of his letter to the Philippians, Paul wrote a passionate plea: “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel” (Phil.1v27, emphasis added).
Notice his logic: living “worthy of the gospel of Christ” must include “with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel”. When the Son of Man is lifted up, He draws people together to Himself (see John 12v32). A culture of individual isolation and lone rangers is not a culture of the gospel.
The gospel creates a taste of heaven that is fruitful on earth: an anticipation of that day in heaven when, like the seraphim, we cry to each other in affectionate shared adoration: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”
