“To lay down one’s life for your friends”

By Rev. Michael Stonhouse

Meditation – Sunday, May 5, 2024

John 15: 9-17 (Forward, p.7) CEV p. 1122

“There is no greater love than this than to lay down one’s life of one’s friends”. I still remember where this verse of Scripture first came to my mind. I was at historic St. Luke’s Anglican Church in downtown Red Deer, and this verse was inscribed at the bottom of a stained-glass window. Appropriately, the window was one of the Crucifixion, of Jesus on the Cross. But what made even more interesting—and intriguing—was that the window was dedicated to the memory of a soldier who had lost his life in battle, given his life for his country. I didn’t think too much about it at the time, but I now would like to know ‘the rest of the story.’ Was his death, for instance, a particular act of bravery, particularly one where he put his life on the line to protect or save his fellow soldiers? Or was it a more vague, more generalized sense of honour and sacrifice, as was common with many soldiers, that this was a war to end tyranny, to bring about peace and freedom to the world, to serve one’s country and one’s fellow countrymen? It would be interesting, and possibility quite instructive and inspiring, to know this.

But we do know why Jesus laid down His life for us, His friends. Theories of the Atonement are many and varied, and probably each of them contains at least a fragment of the truth, a small part of why He did this. Here are some of them:

-to bridge the gap, the separation ‘between God and man’.

-to take our place and pay the price of sin, our sin.

-to take the very worst that humans could do to each other and rob it

of its power.

-to defeat sin, death, shame, evil and the devil once and for all.

Regardless of the underlying effect, He did this for us, and did so freely and willingly. No one took His life from Him; He surrendered, gave, it freely and of His own accord.

And, in contrast to the wonderful and famous words we quoted at the beginning, we were scarcely His friends. Perhaps His disciples were, but as the apostle Paul so bluntly puts it in Romans 5:8-10, we were hostile

and disobedient to God, His enemies in fact, and yet Christ still chose to die for us:

“While we were God's enemies, he made us his friends through the death of his Son. Surely, now that we are his friends, he will save us through his Son's life.”

And so, as Paul indicates, we have hereby become His friends. But Jesus doesn’t leave there. He tells us that as He has done this for us, out of His great love for us, we should also do this for each other. That is how we honour His love and show our gratitude for it, namely by reciprocating it in our love for others.

Forward notes: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (verse 13).

“In much of our society, genealogical and marital relationships are prioritized over friendship or ‘chosen family.’ Christianity has an alternative view of traditional family structures, and through our baptisms, we are re-born into the family of Christ, the Church. Today’s gospel affirms the relational importance of friendship as Jesus tells the disciples that they are no longer servants but friends.

“Of all the relationships that enrich my life, one of the most important is my relationship with my best friend. Though we are both married to other people, I call her my soulmate. Over the course of several decades, we have seen each other through many of life’s joys and sorrows—marriages and divorces, family deaths, job transitions. She probably knows me better than I know myself!

“That Jesus calls the disciples and, by extension, us his friends expresses a powerfully loving intimacy, a relationship of choice, that he lives into by his death for us, the ones whom he calls friends.”

Moving Forward: “Who do you call friends? Call or text them and thank them for the gift of friendship.”