Virtuous friendship
Prudence and constancy might not sound like much fun, but they create the load-bearing relationships communities need to flourish.
(Illustration: Studio M1 / iStock / Getty)
What role does friendship play in a flourishing community? I ask this as a person who was raised to believe that, as the title of a Kacey Musgraves song has it, family is family—that it is the primary set of relationships that won’t let you down. Even if this simply reveals the extent to which I grew up in the UK equivalent of the boondocks, I still hold a hunch that family units (in their wonderfully rich varieties) trump friendships.
Yet friendship is one of the fundamentals of divine love commended by Christ himself. On the night before his death, as he prepares for betrayal, he gives to his closest disciples a new commandment: that they love one another as he has loved them. Tellingly, Jesus unpacks this commandment not through ideas of family or work or power obligations, but through friendship: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer . . . but I have called you friends” (John 15:12–15).
As Christ faces death, he prioritizes friendship; he resets the relationship between God and humanity from master/servant to friend among friends. Christ singles out friendship and challenges us to interrogate what this commonplace relationship looks like at its best. Indeed, can friendship truly be the kind of load-bearing fundamental relationship Christ seems to say it is?
