I Have Called You Friends
English. Spanish. Italian.
Michiel Peeters - (*) First, we invoke the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of life.” Because for the work we do today to be fruitful, “we” must be there, with our humanity “turned on,” sensitive, with our reason open, with a heart of flesh, with our freedom active. Just as we do not make ourselves, we cannot recreate ourselves; but we can ask for it: Come Holy Spirit.
1. #whitenights
I begin with a few sentences from Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, not because I love Russian literature—which is also the case—but because this novella has become a TikTok craze among teenagers in recent months (videos with the hashtag #whitenights have now been viewed more than 40 million times, and the book is currently number four on the list of best-selling translated literature in America). White Nights is an 1848 story about an introverted, 26-year-old narrator who lives peacefully in his dream world until he befriends and eventually falls in love with Nastenka, a lonely girl he meets by chance. In this encounter and subsequent friendship, his “desire to be liked” and his longing to “live” “in this life” are dramatically awakened. The story begins as follows:
It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humored and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader, very youthful, but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart! . . . Speaking of capricious and ill-humored people, I cannot help recalling my moral condition all that day. From early morning, I had been oppressed by a strange despondency. It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, anyone is entitled to ask who “everyone” was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg, I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all of Petersburg as it was; that was why I felt as though they were all deserting me when all of Petersburg packed up and went to its summer villa. I felt afraid of being left alone, and for three whole days, I wandered about the town in profound dejection, not knowing what to do with myself.
Until then, the protagonist had managed to make himself comfortable in his little, inaccessible corner, as though hiding from the light of day; once he slips into his corner, he grows to it like a snail, or, anyway, he is in that respect very much like that remarkable creature, which is an animal and a house both at once…. He is … fond of his four walls, which are invariably painted green, grimy, dismal, and reeking unpardonably of tobacco smoke…. When [he] is visited by one of his few acquaintances (and he ends by getting rid of all his friends), [he meets] him with … embarrassment, changing countenance and overcome with confusion, as though he had only just committed some crime within its four walls.
But now, in the summer, as people from the city move away to their dachas, his profound loneliness emerges. He looks at his “grimy green walls, [his] ceiling covered with a spider’s web, the growth of which [his landlady] has so successfully encouraged.” He looks over all his “furniture, examined every chair, wondering whether the trouble lay there (for if one chair is not standing in the same position as it stood the day before, I am not myself).”
But realizing his loneliness opens him up to something he had managed to avoid until then: meeting and befriending someone.
I quote this story because if something is a “craze,” it may express something many feel.
We can try to hide in our little, inaccessible corners, but “if one chair is not standing in the same position as it stood the day before,” if something small changes, all our loneliness emerges. But this can be a chance because maybe we are not made for our little corner, for escaping in a dream world, but for living, for living “in this world.”
2. Friendship
Friendship—the relationship with another human being in which each desires the happiness of the other—can be the window and the road by which one is challenged and helped to live instead of escaping from life.
We realize this when we experience “pieces of friendship,” as in recent weeks when a well-known student died in a skiing accident. Her student association arranged for a reception where hundreds of other students stopped by so that the friends of the deceased girl would not be alone in this situation. The death of your friend can lead you to despair when the people around you retreat into their dream worlds. Instead, the presence of many fellow students around the friends of the deceased student made it possible for them to “live through” this drama.
We will look briefly at how some great minds have defined the phenomenon of friendship, not out of any abstract philosophical interest but to better understand our lives. But before we look at their descriptions, let’s briefly fix some lived experience you would call friendship. If we had never lived anything that falls—even if minimally—under the phenomenon we are discussing, we would not be able to understand anything that would be said about it either. But if we know—in the Biblical sense of “having experienced”—something a little like it, then today’s journey can help us understand our experience better, enjoy it more, stand in it more appreciatively, and be more fruitful.
Aristotle said, “Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.” (By the way, it would be good if, with every sentence and step we take, we ask ourselves: is this true? Is there something in my experience that confirms this? We cannot learn from another’s experience if we do not find a syntony with our own.)
What is this friendship without which a person would not want to live, even if he had all other goods? In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis identifies some of its essential characteristics:
The very condition of having friends is that we should want something else besides friends.
Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travelers.
Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden).
And, finally:
Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; friends hardly ever about their friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.
Side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Still, not every momentary shared interest may be capable of transforming an interpersonal relationship into friendship. 2,000 years ago, Cicero defined vera amicitia as “an accord in all things human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection” (De Amicitia, 20). What does this mean?
When he taught in a high school in Milan, Fr Giussani said to his students:
You’ve been together for five years now; maybe you always sit at the same school desk, and you are still strangers to each other. [You don’t help each other to create anything, to enjoy the new in anything, you don’t love anything, you don’t help each other to love; one would not give a hair to help the other, except for a calculation for which he would get back a hundred times as much... It means that what sets your life is false, is not human.” It is not human because friendship is the most immediate product of a lived humanity: so as one grows up, he becomes “friends.”] “What you call friendship is fortuitous connivance that makes you go out in the evenings, maybe invite a girl to join you on a weekend trip; at most, to help each other the very last days before specific exams; but you are conniving, not friends, nor fellow travelers, because you are not conscious of your destiny, you are not conscious of each other’s purpose, and therefore your feelings are purely instinctive, dictated by pure instinctiveness (La comunione come strada, Tracce 1994, 5).
[You are conspirators, not friends! And it shows, for example, in the fact] that, especially in the last months of high school, it would seem that you would never forget each other; and instead, one goes away from school, goes to college, goes to work, and forgets the others totally, totally! When you happen to meet, it’s like, “Oh! Great!”, but at the reunion party, you find back a foreign body—sympathetic, but foreign—and I have with the other in common only those moments that waiting at the airport allows me (Si può (veramente?!) vivere così?, 259).
For Giussani, true friendship is mutual love: “I want your destiny, you want my destiny: we are friends.” “Friendship is a companionship to destiny.”
Elsewhere, he speaks of “the profound unity that arises from a living together that is provoked by a common structure” (The Risk of Education, 96). A profound unity that arises from a living together, provoked by a common structure.
We conclude this brief review of descriptions of friendship with Jesus’s phrase that gives the title to our exercises: “I have called you friends because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.” For Jesus, friendship is sharing his relationship with the Father, the experience he has with his Origin and Destiny.
3. A Common Structure
We have heard some brilliant definitions; now we come to the interesting part, which is discovering and verifying the dynamics described in our experience, so that they can enrich it. How does this “profound unity,” this “great good” without which “no one would want to live,” how does the phenomenon of friendship emerge? Per Giussani, it arises from “living together.” No unity, community, communion, or friendship can arise without some living together. If he had remained in “his little, inaccessible corner,” the protagonist of White Nights would have never befriended Nastenka. But not any living together gives rise to friendship. Friendship emerges from “a living together provoked by a common structure.”
What is this common structure, capable of being provoked? We are here from different continents, with different ages, cultural backgrounds, economic situations, political opinions, and life experiences: what is the structure we all share, from which a friendship can emerge? Our humanity! What we all share is our humanity; our common structure, is that what makes us humans; nothing more and nothing less.
How is this humanity of ours made? As always, we can understand it in experience. We can understand what being human is when we observe ourselves when we live humanly. What does it mean to live in a human way? It means living while adhering freely to how we are made.
4. Adhering Freely to How We Are Made
I will try to illustrate this with what may be the most important moment of the day: the instant we wake up. The moment we wake up is a “crisis,” a highly critical event. What does “crisis” mean? “Crisis” comes from the Greek verb krinei, which means to sift, to judge. Sift with what? With the “sieve” of our heart, with the criterion of our original experience.
Unfortunately…, the word “crisis” … is normally understood in a doubtful or negative sense, as if crisis and critique were to coincide automatically with negation…. This is clearly a short-sighted concept of crisis, of critique. Critique is, first of all, the expression of our human openness, a keenness intent on discovering being, values. It is enough to add a little sincerity and realistic balance, and the affirmation of those discovered values will clearly imply their limits. The word crisis is not linked to “doubt,” but rather to “problem,” which in its Greek root means “placing before,” setting something before one’s eyes (The Journey to Truth Is an Experience, 138).
The moment I wake up is highly problematic in the sense that I am faced with a problem that demands to be addressed. Reality woke me up—I did not decide to wake up; at most, I set the alarm the previous evening—but the moment I wake up, I need to decide whether to open my eyes wide or try to continue sleeping.
What happens if I decide to open my eyes wide? I note here that I must open my eyes wide. If I look at reality through my eyelashes, I can stay in “limbo,” go through life half-asleep, make no actual decision, “be lived,” not live myself, not learn, for quite a long time. It is much better to make a free decision to stay asleep than to open my eyes half-open and live like a zombie. But we can verify that as well. Is it more convenient to live like a zombie or to open your eyes wide at the beginning of the day?
Let’s say I decided to open my eyes wide; now I gaze at reality. What happens then? “Upon gazing at reality, I have before me something that produces openness” (The Religious Sense, 115). When I decide to open my eyes wide, when I gaze at reality, this same reality opens me up more. When I adhered to the openness that reality suggested to me by waking me up, when I decided to gaze at reality with eyes wide open, this same reality opened me up more. In what sense?
Reality presents itself to me in a way that solicits me to pursue something else. I do not react to reality as a photographic film upon which reality “impresses” its image, and that’s that. Not only does reality make an impression upon me, it also [attracts me; literally: it draws me out of my bed; it] stirs me and solicits me to engage in a search for some other thing, something beyond immediate appearances. It latches on to my consciousness, enabling it to pre-sense and perceive something else.
I can express this reaction with questions: What is this in front of me? And why? A kind of strange unknown lies within such questions: the world, the real, provokes me towards something else. Otherwise, one would not ask why, or how. I do not simply register everything my consciousness encounters. Rather, I am entirely perturbed by this relationship with the real, pushed beyond the immediate (The Religious Sense, 115).
If I go along with this dynamic as I follow, give space to, do not block, the openness generated in me by the impact of reality allowed by me (by opening my eyes), then this openness turns out to be openness to something infinite. When I open my eyes wide in the morning, I feel that reality calls me to something very big.
The world is a sign. Reality calls us on to another reality. Reason, in order to be faithful to its nature and to the nature of such a calling, needs to admit the existence of something else underpinning, explaining everything. By nature, the human being intuits the Beyond (The Religious Sense, 146).
What is the test that following this original openness—giving credit to what the impact of reality naturally provokes in me, until admitting, arriving at the Beyond, at the mysterious implication of everything, at the Mystery—is “true,” is fully human? The test is its human convenience: that my circumstances do not suffocate me anymore; that I become surprisingly reasonable, able to look at the single problems reality presents without being blackmailed by them.
5. Impatience
Already in the first moments of the day, we can also sense a dynamic that tends to detract from our openness—and thus the freedom it brings when followed. Instead of ensuing the call of reality all the way until I get to the Mystery implied by everything—by the existence of everything, and certainly by the existence of my infinite desire, awakened by reality’s impact—I can decide—and de facto I do it all the time—that what I am looking for is “this or that”: not just: stay asleep; but also: achieve this or that, control this or that, obtain this or that. Instead of recognizing that all that is not enough for my heart and that I can only breathe in a free recognition of the Mystery, I identify what reality provokes in me in something small, something I possess or can control if I do my best.
I Have a Great, Great Friend
“Sometimes though I avoid Him, / and want to act on my own. / But soon my world falls to pieces.” In fact, what is the “verification” of idolatry (for this dynamics, of identifying what my heart needs—what is provoked in me by the impact of reality, if I follow its provocation—with something small, something under my grasp, is called “idolatry”, the dynamics of the idol)? That “soon my world falls to pieces,” in the sense that I begin to censure or forget things, that I become unreasonable with the single problems, unfree, that I suffocate in the circumstances… All those fantastic “dashboard lights,” the One who made us equipped us with for our navigation through life…
Reality must continuously “enter a crisis.” That is, reality must be permitted to provoke our humanity all the way, until we arrive at its ultimate implication. Reality must be permitted to be a “problem” for us so that it can unleash, through its impact on us, the great possibilities, the great promises it speaks about.
This is our humanity, the “common structure, capable of being provoked” we spoke about, that underlies true, lasting friendship. Because a friend is someone who helps me in this, to see this, to grow in this. Who stimulates me to live my humanity fully. A friend asks me, “What do you really want?” “Is this small thing you have identified as your goal really the level at which you want to live?” And maybe he is not even asking that with words, but with his way of being, his enviable way of being in the same reality I am in! In line with what St Francis of Assisi said: always preach the good news, with words if necessary…
6. A Man Sent to Men
Jesus Christ claims to be this for each of us; to be “the” friend of man, as the Fathers of the Church called him: phil-anthropos, the friend of man, the one who knows what man is and wants man to flourish in his humanity. The Catholic Church says about Jesus of Nazareth:
Jesus Christ…, the Word made flesh [God who became a human being, meaning made a man], was sent as “a man to men.” He … perfected revelation [he perfected Mystery’s provoking us] by fulfilling it through his whole work of making Himself present and manifesting Himself: through His words and deeds, His signs and wonders (Dei Verbum, 4).
Let’s have a look at some of those words and deeds of his:
a. Open Your Eyes! Look!
Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them.… Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you…? … Seek … the kingdom [of God]…, and all these things will be given you besides (Matt 6:26–33).
[Jesus] sat down opposite the [Temple] treasury and observed how the crowd put money into [it]. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow also came and put in two small coins worth a few cents. Calling his disciples to himself, he said to them, “[Look at this poor widow!] … [She] put in more than all the other contributors” (Mark 12:41–43).
At that time, the disciples approached Jesus and said, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child over, placed it in their midst, and said, “[Look at this child!] Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt 18:1–3).
Who is the child? The one who enters reality with his eyes wide open!
b. Don’t Be a “Photographic Film”! Let Your Humanity Be Provoked by What You See!
To what shall I compare the people of this generation? What are they like? They are like children who sit in the marketplace and call to one another, “We played the flute for you, but you did not dance. We sang a dirge, but you did not weep” (Luke 7:31–32).
Again, he entered the synagogue. There was a man there who had a withered hand. They watched him closely to see if he would cure him on the sabbath so that they might accuse him. He said to the man with the withered hand, “Come up here before us.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” But they remained silent. Looking around at them with anger and grieved at their hardness of heart, he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately took counsel with the Herodians against him to put him to death (Mark 3:1–6).
c. Don’t Stop at the Surface!
The next day, John was there again with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he said, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” The two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following him and said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi”…, “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come, and you will see” (John 1:35–39).
The tempter approached and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.” He said in reply, “It is written: “‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God’” (Mark 4:3–4).
You are looking for something… What are you looking for? To understand, discover, and live what you are looking for, the irreducibility of your need, you need a road. “Come and see.”
[After the multiplication of the loaves,] other boats came from Tiberias near the place where they had eaten the bread when the Lord gave thanks. When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they … got into boats and came to Capernaum looking for Jesus. And when they found him across the sea they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”
Jesus answered them and said, “… You are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him the Father, God, has set his seal” (John 6:23–27).
As he was making his way out of the temple area, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, teacher, what stones and what buildings!” Jesus said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be one stone left upon another that will not be thrown down” (Mark 13:1–2).
[Jesus] had to pass through Samaria. So he came to … Jacob’s well…. Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well. It was about noon.
A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.
The Samaritan woman said to him, “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” (For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” [The woman] said to him, “Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the well is deep; where then can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself with his children and his flocks?”
Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:4–14).
Or that sentence that sums it all up:
What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life? (Matt 16:26).
Each of us can see in our experience that life does not coincide with achieving everything we have in our minds. Jesus is the friend who reminds us of that. Open your eyes! Let your humanity be provoked! Don’t stop at the surface!
d. Everything Speaks of the Present Mystery
Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows” (Matt 10:29–31).
When [Jesus] saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him. He began to teach them, saying: “Do not swear by your head, for you cannot make a single hair white or black. Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one (Matt 5:1–2, 36–37).
Isn’t this “knowledge”—when it becomes experience—liberating? “Even all the hairs of your head are counted.”
e. Conversion: Becoming Familiar with This Gaze
At that time some people who were present there told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. He said to them in reply, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans? [because then as now people sought a moralistic explanation of everything] By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did! Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!” (Luke 13:1–5).
If you do not “repent.” To understand this sentence, we need to know that “repentance” is the word by which one usually translates the Greek metanoia. However, this term—composed of the prefix meta- and the substantive nous, the former meaning “change,” and the latter denoting “mentality, way of thinking”—originally had a primarily cognitive meaning, namely as a “change of heart or mind,” a “new way of thinking or seeing things.” Therefore, it would be better to translate it with “conversion.” You will perish, if you do not convert, if you do not obtain a new way of looking, a new, true, totally human way of using your reason. This is also the meaning of the new wine bags that we must become: “People do not put new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise the skins burst, the wine spills out, and the skins are ruined. Rather, they pour new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved” (Matt 9:17).
7. An Enviable Human Intensity
Those around Jesus—friend or foe—couldn’t help being impressed by his peerless humanity, unmatched reasonableness, and freedom—all that, without him having any official appointment or position.
When Jesus finished these words, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as their scribes (Mark 7:28–29).
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. He came to Jesus at night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him” (John 3:1–2).
The [Samaritan] woman left her water jar and went into the town and said to the people, “Come see a man who told me everything I have done. Could he possibly be the Messiah?”
They went out of the town and came to him.
Meanwhile, the disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” So the disciples said to one another, “Could someone have brought him something to eat?”
Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work. Do you not say, ‘In four months the harvest will be here’? I tell you, look up and see the fields ripe for the harvest. The reaper is already receiving his payment and gathering crops for eternal life, so that the sower and reaper can rejoice together. For here the saying is verified that ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work.” (John 4:28–38).
The guards went to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked them, “Why did you not bring him?” The guards answered, “Never before has anyone spoken like this one” (John 7:45–46).
Pier Paolo Pasolini has said, that if someone has educated you, he can only have done so by his being, not by his speaking (Lutheran Letters 1983, 27). One of the most impressive aspects of the Lord’s “being,” for his disciples, was the fact that he secluded himself at night—when they were asleep—to pray, that is, say “You” to the Mystery, whom he called “the Father”: “He made the disciples get into the boat and precede him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. After doing so, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When it was evening he was there alone” (Matt 14:22–23); “The report about him spread all the more, and great crowds assembled to listen to him and to be cured of their ailments, but he would withdraw to deserted places to pray” (Luke 5:15–16); “Rising very early before dawn, he left and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35). “In those days he departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12). Apparently, this was so fascinating, he came back from it in such a way, that his disciples—who certainly did not excel in formal piety—could not help but ask him: Lord, teach us to pray too! (Luke 11:1).
But perhaps most impressive was how he spoke of “the Father” and lived his relationship with Him. The Mystery is Father: tam pater nemo, “so much father is no one,” for our human father and mother do not give us being in this moment.
“They did not see [Jesus] perform a single act without its form demonstrating his consciousness of the Father” (Giussani, 1999). Everything the Lord said and did expressed his consciousness of the Father. And because of this consciousness, he was so peerlessly human, so reasonable and free.
[They said to him:] “Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” So Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:31–33).
“The Father has life in Himself” (John 5:26). “The Father raises the dead and gives life” (John 5:21). “The Father always hears me” (John 11:41–42). “The Father does not judge anyone” (John 5:22). “My Father is [always] at work” (John 5:17). “The one who sent me [wants] that I should not lose anything of what he gave me” (John 6:39). “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him” (John 6:44). “I am not alone, but it is I and the Father who sent me” (John 8:16). “The Father knows me and I know the Father” (John 10:15). “The … Father gave me [works] to accomplish” (John 5:36).
Jesus went up to Jerusalem. He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money-changers seated there. He … drove them all out of the temple area…, and said, “… Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace” (John 2:13–16).
They said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “What I told you from the beginning…. The one who sent me is true, and what I heard from him I tell the world.” They did not realize that he was speaking to them of the Father (John 8:25–27).
“The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do what is pleasing to him.” Because he spoke this way, many came to believe in him (John 8:29–30).
The Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered them, “I told you and you do not believe…. My Father … is greater than all, and … the Father and I are one” (John 10:24–30).
If I do not perform my Father’s works, do not believe me; but if I perform them, even if you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may realize [and understand] that the Father is in me and I am in the Father” (John 10:37–38).
I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life [true life]. So what I say, I say as the Father told me (John 12:49–50).
In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places (John 14:2).
You heard me tell you, “I am going away and I will come back to you.” If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father; for the Father is greater than I (John 14:28).
“I have told you this in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures but I will tell you clearly about the Father” (John 16:25). “Everything that the Father has is mine” (John 16:15). “As the Father loves me, so I also love you” (John 15:9). “Behold, the hour is coming and has arrived when each of you … will leave me alone. But I am not alone, because the Father is with me” (John 16:32). “Shall I not drink the cup that the Father gave me?” (John 18:11). Or finally, during his long prayer at the end of the Last Supper:
[Father,] I revealed your name [your presence] to those whom you gave me out of the world…. I pray for them…. Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are….
Now I am coming to you. I speak this in the world so that they may share my joy completely….
I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one…. As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world….
Father, they are your gift to me. I wish that where I am they also may be with me, that they may see my glory that you gave me, because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
Righteous Father, the world also does not know you, but I know you, and they know that you sent me.
I made known to them your name and I will make it known, that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them” (John 17:6–26).
Always about the Father. The Father, the Father, the Father. In fact, “I have called you friends because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father,” (John 15:15), everything I have understood in my relationship with the Mystery. So much so that Philip exclaims: “Master, show us [that] Father, and that will be enough for us” (John 14:8).
Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me [if you experience me], then you will also know [experience] my Father” (John 14:6–7).
8. “I Have Called You Friends”
Now let’s look at the people who followed Jesus day in and day out. Let us, for example,
try to think of Andrew and John when they went away from Jesus that night [after having spent that first afternoon with him]; they came home more in silence than talking, and when they came into their houses, they had a different face, so much so that their children noticed it, and Andrew’s wife said to him, “You are different, what happened to you?” They were different! … [If a man runs into and follows] the path that leads him to Destiny, … that has as a symptom a change (LG, La comunione come strada, 1994, Tracce, p. 5).
Christ is the friend because he is the pedagogue, as the fathers of the Church called him. The Mystery is phil-anthropos (he who knows what man is and loves it), and Christ is the educator. He is the authority, as Giussani defines that concept:
In our particular milieu, some individuals have a greater sensitivity to the human experience; in fact, they develop a deeper understanding of any given situation and of others; in fact, they are more likely to influence the movement that builds a community. They live our experience more intensely and with a greater commitment. We all feel that they are more representative of us. With them we feel closer to, and stay more willingly in community with, others.
To acknowledge this phenomenon is to be loyal to our own humanity, a duty spurred by wisdom. When we discover ourselves helpless and alone, our humanity spurs us to come together. If we meet someone who better feels and understands our experience, suffering, needs, and expectations, we naturally are led to follow that person and become his or her disciple. In that sense, such persons naturally constitute authority for us even if they do not carry special rights or titles. Naturally, above all, it is one who most loyally lives or understands the human experience who becomes an authority.
Thus, authority is born as a wealth of experience that imposes itself on others. It generates freshness, wonder, and respect. Inevitably, it is attractive; it is evocative. Not to value the presence of this effective authority that His Being places in every setting is to cling pettily to our own limits.
The Jews said of Christ: “This is one who has authority,” and they abandoned the schemes of the Pharisees to follow Him. The encounter with this natural authority develops our sensitivity and our conscience; it helps us to discover better our nature and what we aspire to from the depths of our present poverty (The Journey to Truth Is an Experience, 56–57).
Friendship is “the most immediate product of a lived humanity”; when one grows up as a human being, he becomes “friends.” In the measure that we permit our humanity to be educated by what we have recognized as an authority, we should be able to retrieve in our experience these characteristics of friendship: helping each other in being creative, in enjoying what is new and true, in loving; being prepared to give one’s life for the happiness of the other. Is it not true that we, as we are here together, are prepared to give our lives for one another?
9. Does This Friendship Continue Somewhere?
I quote a phrase from Fr Giussani’s At the Origin of the Christian Claim (90) that summarizes what we have said today (it is not on the handout sheet, I found it only yesterday, so write it down if you wish!):
Solitude is eliminated only in the discovery of Being as love which gives Itself continually. Existence is realized, in substance, as dialogue with the Great Presence which constitutes it—an inseparable companion. The company is in our “I,” there is nothing that we do by ourselves.
Every human friendship is the reverberation of the original structure of being, and if this is denied, its truth is in jeopardy.
In Jesus, the Emmanuel, the “God with us,” familiarity and dialogue with Him who creates us at every moment become not only illuminating transparency but also historical companionship.
That brings us to the question, does this friendship of Christ, this education, continue? Is it only illuminating transparency, long ago, or also illuminating companionship?
The Christians say: it is. For Christ has risen. Jesus said, “You will see greater things than these” (John 1:50; 5:20) and “I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matt 28:20).
Where does this phil-anthropy, this friendship, this pedagogy continue?
Each has all the instruments to recognize it happening. And then has all the freedom to decide to stay there, go along with it, follow it.
The test of the truth of a preference, of something we call friendship, is that it opens us up to others: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” (John 20:21). “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15).
Péguy said, “Blessed are those friends who feel and taste the pleasure of keeping silent together.”
Silence is the space we need not to lose what strikes us and to let it work on our humanity. Let’s use this time well, reflecting on what we have heard and bringing your questions or experiences to the assembly.
“I Have Called You Friends” (John 15:15) - Spiritual Exercises for High School and University Students and Young Professionals - Tilburg, 15 March 2025 - Reflection by Fr Michiel Peeters, University Chaplain
