WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE

The appeal of the message of the Christian faith is often diminished by the message seeming to be at odds with itself. At base, the human lesson Christianity seeks to instill is a fundamental and sound one: be decent. That’s an ethical and behavioral injunction. Treat others with respect. Call such respect “love” if you want or must, but respect is less ambiguous than love. Respect is the recognition of the shared limitations of us all, coexisting with recognition that we all desire to be accepted in spite of our limitations. It’s the polite behavior of bestowing recognition of the dignity of others not because they (or we) deserve it but because we’re all entitled to recognition because we so need it.

Respect battles contempt, which is much colder than mere hatred. Hatred at least attaches importance to the object of hatred, while contempt dismisses the possibility of the significance of its object.

“God is respect” is a better admonition than “God is love.” But it’s a person-to-person admonition. There is no imperative for a human to respect God or Jesus, because they have no impairments constraining recognition or respect. They don’t require our politeness like other humans do.

What prompts this reflection is a Christmas piece by Christian writer Peter Wehner that appeared in the New York Times on December 24, 2022. The title of the essay is “Why Jesus Loved Friendship.” It’s a striking illustration of a Christian message at odds with itself. Mr. Wehner proposes that Jesus befriends us and that we befriend Jesus. This seems unlikely, since Jesus is God in Christian dogma. A human isn’t in a friendship relationship with a god. It’s not a natural affinity, but even more unnatural than marrying one’s sister or first cousin. It’s an unhealthy union.

No, friendship and divinity are not compatible. A person doesn’t befriend the numinous. The point of the numinous is that it’s transcendent. If one could befriend it, or it could befriend a human, it would cease to be numinous.

Mr. Wehner begins his piece with a curious interpretation of John 15: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my father I have made known to you.”

From this ambiguous passage, Mr. Wehner concludes that we humans and Jesus are buddies, on a level, sharing “mutual affection, intimacy, and self-revelation.” He has just quoted, “You are my friends if you do what I command.” Friendship has no commander and commanded, except in this odd rendering of an old text. The thrust of the passage is benevolent condescension, of bestowing favor and status on those who subjugate themselves to the higher being and do his bidding. There is no parity in this passage; there are shepherd and sheep, driver and driven, overseer and overseen. The point of the numinous is to reside above, beyond. The point of the numinous is to be yielded to, not to be chummed with.

This is a crucial misconception in Christian and most, if not all, theistic religions: the assertion that the human and the transcendent can be indistinguishable. It nullifies the transcendent and falsely elevates the human. Mr. Wehner fills his essay with numerous quotations from scholars and theologians providing “exegesis” on John 15, mostly ratifying his own notion that the divine wants to be just like us and that we want to feel we’re just like the divine.

Friendship is a human relational association. It revolves around respect. It is mutuality, the acknowledgment that no one person is inherently better or worse than another. None of us really believes even that standard assertion—we all assign better or worse, higher or lower status to others all the time. We identify by differentiation. But it’s falser yet to apply “friendship” to the relation between God and humans, to assert equality and mutuality with the divine and sublime. It’s hubris. And the hubris is a major source of the off-putting nature of Christianity’s misdirection. Mr. Wehner shows no signs of recognizing this possibility among recipients of the message.

This writer, although an atheist and humanist, has more respect for the difference between the divine and the human. If there were a God, he or she wouldn’t be my friend any more than a monarch or a monarch butterfly would be my friend. We’re too differently situated to be intimate. We can relate with each other, but even the human monarch faces circumstances I’d be unlikely to appreciate. We lack sufficient commonality, occupy different universes. Friendship is the acknowledgment and embracing of similarity, particularly the embracing of similar deficiencies and flaws.

It's conceivable that one could hold a version of Mr. Wehner’s sense of friendship with Jesus without its having a pernicious effect on human relations. But it would require a finer attunement to the nuances of symbol and metaphor than most of us can manage. Overestimation of self is probably the chief impediment to decency and respect for others. Imagining oneself to be in any meaningful way on a level with God, to be in a position to provide succor and comfort to Jesus, to God, is overestimation. It can’t facilitate closer or more meaningful human friendships.

We’re all susceptible to the lure of vicarious aggrandizement. We brag about having been at an early Springsteen concert in 1975, as if that “sharing” of an evening with Bruce reduces our distinction from him. We boast that our nephew’s cousins wife worked in the Obama White House and shook his hand on three different occasions. We’re starstruck-prone, impressed as much with our proximity to the star as we are with the star herself. The Greens of the Hobby Lobby empire would likely pay millions for a sliver of the One True Cross, and would swell with pride to display this immediacy of their bond with Jesus.

Mr. Wehner encourages this distortion of relationship, sees a positive power in imagining being on a first-name basis with Jesus and God. He writes that Christianity won the “affections of his heart” by providing a means to be seen and known by God, to see and know God, to know not only we need God but “in some essential way, he needs us.”

How could such delusion not distort human-to-human relations? Who would not be tempted, faced with any friction between coming to the aid of God in His need and coming to the aid of an alcohol-addled beggar in the street, to give his friend God priority? I imagine Mr. Wehner would respond in an expected Christian manner and say, “But don’t you see, they’re one and the same? God needs me to fulfill the duty of meeting the needs of the beggar. Jesus said if you’ve done it to the least of these you’ve done it to me.”

But this puts the source of duty in the wrong place. The duty arises from the mutuality of circumstance, the commonality of need, among humans. The beggar needs some fundamental, irreducible needs met. She needs a place to stay, more suitable clothes, money for a meal or a drink, provision of abuse counseling, respect as a human beset by vulnerabilities any of us might suffer. She doesn’t need help because God needs me or you to help her. She needs help in her own right, in a direct and first-person way, and her implacable, fundamental needs might be as well met by a respectful atheist as by a person compelled to help out his friend God by helping the beggar.

The God element is an unnecessary filter, a remove from the human immediacy of the beggar. The God part is a mechanism of inducement, a dangling of a feel-good reward for behaving humanly and humanely. If I help the beggar to please my friend God, I’m invested in self-aggrandizement as well as in decency and respect for a suffering fellow human. I’m acting to boost my esteem in the eyes of my friend God.

“So what?” a Christian might say. If the beggar is provided for, who cares if the motivation is selfless or is prompted by a God-is-my-friend delusion? We should care because the filter is seductive, the filter so easily becomes the primary focus. The filter is what leads an earnest Christian to feel the need to rescue the infidel, the pagan, the heathen, the unbeliever, the lesser human. One’s duty to God and one’s duty to fellow human beings are seldom entirely compatible, because the duty to God takes precedence. Missionary zeal leads one to think “wrong” beliefs, “wrong” cultures, “wrong” behaviors and practices must be replaced by “right” ones, for the heathen’s own good, and to please my friend God.

Jesus reportedly said we can’t serve God and mammon. He might better have said we can’t genuinely serve God and genuinely serve fellow humans in the same breath. He might have more pointedly said we can’t be fast friends with God, because it invariably makes you a little self-important, too elevated to befriend a lowly human neighbor without condescension.

These hazards escape the attention or notice of Christians like Mr. Wehner. He writes “in ancient times people of unequal wealth and status were very unlikely to be friends.” This suggests he thinks this inequality has since been rectified. In fact, he writes that Jesus “shattered those expectations and the hierarchical relation between God and human beings.” He can’t be saying he believes the two thousand years since Jesus shattered things have brought the human family to a classless and equal state. Even now, in 2023, there are remaining examples of people of unequal status and wealth who aren’t fast friends. Presumably, Mr. Wehner means that, while humans seem as devoted as ever to hierarchy among themselves, at least now the riffraff can be friends with God and Jesus. In fact, he writes “access to the divine is no longer the province of a special caste of influential, privileged people.” From the formation of Christianity until Martin Luther, access to the divine was very much the province of a special caste of Catholic clerics, and still is for many today.

This is an elaborate make-believe world Mr. Wehner constructs. He appears convinced that the supposed eradication of hierarchy between God and humans is a great facilitator of good human behavior. He writes “a vulnerable God is an essential part of the Christian story.” He quotes approvingly someone who says proper understanding of friendship radically changed our perspective on how we are to live in community. Yet he quotes another who observes that the Church and Christianity sometimes fail to adhere to the example of Jesus, and that Jesus’s friendship was “different from contemporary Western society—for outsider, marginalized, stigmatized, outcast, prostitute, sinner.” Of course we fail to adhere to that example, and imagining we and Jesus occupy the same space is one of the reasons for the failure.

Finally, Mr. Wehner swings back to what he overlooked in the John 15 passage: “You are my friends if you do what I command.” He quotes another source who says “friendship with Jesus doesn’t replace the call to be obedient to him or his authority.” There are few more warped expressions of friendship than “You are my friends if you do what I command.” No human friendship could or would tolerate that assertion of power and dominance by one of the friends. This is the ultimate in conditional love, and Christian doctrine says Hell is the destination for the “friend” who doesn’t do what Jesus commands.

Jesus was addressing followers, seekers of a new and different wisdom, and presenting himself as their mentor, superior, and instructor. There’s nothing objectionable in that—people want to be told how to behave and how to navigate stressful lives. But it certainly wasn’t a proclamation of mutuality, mutual affection, intimacy, and self-revelation, of any sort of human friendship.

Such fundamental confusion of the moral model represented by Jesus with the notion of human friendship is similar to the twin thrusts of Christian doctrine as a whole. On the one hand, Christianity has always demanded that we flawed beings must do better, be better, behave above our animal natures and inclinations. On the other hand, it has always balanced those unreasonable expectations with an unreasonable promise of reward—eternal, blissful life. Christians, being human, have lapped up the reward part and largely ignored the behavioral exhortations. The Church has always been complicit in this by assuring adherents that belief is mandatory but behavior is optional.

Mr. Wehner joins the complicity. We can all be great and intimate friends with God and Jesus. They need us and we need them, a genuine two-way street. They care for us, love us unconditionally, die for us, want nothing more than our comfort and equanimity. We’re best buds. Even if we ignore the beggar lady. It’s okay as long as we get in a heartfelt repentance and believe in Jesus before we die. That’s what friends are for—infinite forgiveness.

Written December 25, 2022
©2023 by Lawrence Helms