The implications of the recovery of friendship in the Christian life are inexhaustible. The previous posts that point out these implications constitute only a minute sampling of these implications. I invite you to reflect further on what this understanding of friendship might mean for you in your own faith journey.

It is of great significance that this series finds its culminating post on a Good Friday, for Good Friday was when the friendship of God found its most perfect expression: through the death of God.

God died. Not just for his friends, but also for his enemies. So that he could make them his friends.

Love and friendship are things we hardly take seriously in our communities anymore. The church has too many important things to attend to... finance, growth, structural maintenance, staff employment issues, evangelistic rallies, and more. Surely minutely insignificant issues such as love and friendship can find no place in the scheme of such things.

But it was love and friendship that drove Jesus to the cross. In observing a Good Friday, we are sustaining a conviction that love and friendship take positions of primacy in the life of our faith communities.

Then we have to live like we believe it.