(A series of posts about Friendship with Jesus: An Imaginative Prayer Journey)
Will You Be My Friend?
When you were a kid, did you ever experience someone coming up to you, perhaps in the schoolyard, maybe in the playground, and asking, “Would you like to be my friend?” There is something amazing about this. Someone wants to be with you, wants to share friendship with you and comes right out and asks. It’s a pity we grow out of this beautiful vulnerability. We learn to be much more cagey about choosing friends. As it happens, many of us, most, perhaps, get worse at this as we grow, if friendship statistics are to be believed.
Yet here is Jesus, standing before you, offering his friendship. How will you respond?
Journey of Friendship
These first few posts of Thursday Thoughts have been reflecting on the themes of my new book Friendship with Jesus: An Imaginative Prayer Journey. I hope they have whetted your appetite to pursue this relationship, with the help of my book or otherwise.
This final post in the series looks at the final “stage” of this growing friendship – Resurrection.
When we follow Jesus in friendship, we inevitably hear his call to surrender and “take up our cross and follow him.” It can be a decisive turning point. Do we want this? Is this friendship worth it? Can we possibly trust that this will be good for us?
Even when we have been following him for many years, the call remains, taking us deeper and deeper into God’s heart and away from our egocentric and clutching self. I write in the book:
“The mystery at the center of the resurrected life is that it has already happened, we have already “been raised with Christ” (Colossians 3:1). If we love Jesus and are seeking to follow him, then we are already “seated at the right hand of God” and can “set [our] hearts on things above” (Colossians 3:1). But when we look around at the world and our own lives and see all the struggle and pain, worry and fear, we might find it difficult to understand how we have been “raised with Christ.” (p.123)
The resurrected life can be hard to believe in. It is not so obvious.
Who Are You?
This reminds me of the mysterious dynamic we see in the disciples as they encounter Jesus in his resurrected body. He is not so obvious. They do not recognize him. This has always struck me as bizarre. This was Jesus whom they have been living and traveling with for years – and yet they cannot “see” him. They see what they expect to see, they see a gardener in a garden, they see a traveler on the road, they see a random stranger on the beach. They are “blind” to who Jesus is in this altogether new thing called Resurrection Life. Until he opens their eyes.
I know this blindness. Perhaps you do as well. We find ourselves blind to the radical changes Jesus wants to make in us, caught up in the expected, the normal, the safe. But being a friend of Jesus means a willingness to be transformed at the deepest level, to enter into a completely new way of living. The problem is we all want to be transformed, we just don’t want to change.[1] Living a resurrection life with Jesus requires a change of the most profound kind. And part of our resistance to change reveals itself in our blindness.
These stories of the “unrecognizable” Jesus may help us here.
Jesus Opens Our Eyes
Mary is grieving and in pain (John 20:14-16). Her Lord has been killed. All her hopes and dreams have been crushed. Jesus is gone. She finds herself in the garden where he was buried but his body is gone. Tragedy upon tragedy.
Her eyes are closed to Jesus until he calls her by name. “Mary” he says, gently, calmly, lovingly. In that moment, Mary’s eyes are opened. In the context of friendship - being known, being seen and loved - Jesus opens her eyes to his resurrection life. He draws her out of her pain and into love. Imaginative prayer invites us into this experience in our own lives, hearing our name being called into friendship.
Cleopas and his friend are rehearsing their disappointment (Luke 24:16, 31). “We thought he was the one.” Then Jesus joins them and walks with them, hidden from recognition. He listens and then opens their minds to the wonders of God’s ways found in Israel's story.
But their eyes remain closed until Jesus takes the bread in his hands - the bread of hospitality, the bread of friendship, the bread of his very body – and breaks it, taking them back to that upper room where he ate with them and offered his life to them. Suddenly they see him for who he is – Jesus, the One who draws them out of their despair and into hope and friendship.
Peter is back on the water, returning to what he knows, what he is familiar with – fishing (John 21:4-7). Jesus had appeared in the upper room and breathed on them, but then disappeared. What does this all mean? What are they supposed to do now?
Peter’s eyes are closed until the the stranger on the beach tells him to throw his nets on the other side of the boat. This takes Peter back to that first meeting on this very beach when he felt such shame – “Go away from me, Lord. I am a sinful man.” But Jesus remained. He was not put off by Peter’s shame. He is not put off by yours. He draws Peter away from his shame and into friendship. “Follow me, Peter. I am re-making you.”
I am often blind to Jesus in this same way until I hear him call my name, until he offers to eat with me, until I see, once again, that he knows me and yet still calls me friend. The resurrection life begins with friendship.
Practice Resurrection
I reference this book, and theme, by Eugene Peterson in my final chapter, “Rising with Jesus.” Peterson borrowed it from a poem by Wendell Berry called, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” In it, Berry calls us to live courageously, to throw off the fears that hold us back, the earth-bound restrictions that keep us small and colorless.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
(Go now and read the whole poem. Its worth it! https://www.context.org/iclib/ic30/berry/)
May Jesus heal our blindness so we might live a life worthy of our resurrection.
Jesus comes to you, like that vulnerable young person in your memory, and asks, “Would you like to be my friend?” It will end up costing you your whole life – but it will be the most amazing friendship you can imagine.
You may want to pray with this resurrection theme. You can do so here:
Please share this post with whomever you think might be encouraged by it. Thanks for reading!
[1] This phrase is not original to me but I can’t find who said it.
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