Last night, I did a rare thing for me, offering a reflection in a church, to the Isaiah Community, as below...
I feel a bit of an impostor, stood behind a lectern giving a religious address. It’s not that I haven’t done it before. I used to be an Anglican priest. However, now I’m agnostic about Christianity – though I rather like the phrase Diarmaid MucCulloch has coined, being a ‘candid friend’ of Christianity. You see, we agnostics worry about Christianity too – and for not dissimilar reasons to those I imagine are shared by many here. We know we need it, as much as those of faith need it, for Christianity is the great story of our lives. But we worry that this great story, at least in the west, is not speaking to our humanity as it might do, so as to enlarge it.
It turns out that the subject of friendship itself provides a good case in point. Friendship these days is treated as if it were the easy love, the one that forms the unthinking backdrop of our lives. We’re like the ladies of Sex and the City: during the week, lovers come and go; but at Saturday brunch, friends remain. Or we’re one of the half a billion users of Facebook who, when we’re bored or distracted, can always find a friend online. Or we’re like the vicar who welcomes his congregation on a Sunday with that warm word: ‘Friends.’ But is friendship so straightforward, so unthinking? It’s not what the New Testament would have us think.
Take the story of the Good Samaritan. I thought I understood it, and moreover that we are living in a society that could be said to embody its message to a remarkable degree. In the NHS, for example, care is free at the point of need. That surely is what the Samaritan offered the Jew in the ditch, and what the other two did not. But it was not until I started to think about friendship, and read the rebel Catholic philosopher Ivan Illich, that I saw otherwise.
Illich thought that the parable has been subtly misunderstood, and in so doing its meaning has been what he called ‘perverted.’ It’s not about welfarism, he argued. The key detail is the way Luke describes the compassion the Samaritan has for the Jew. The important word is one of those wonderful Greek ones – splankgnizesthi, from Splanknon, the bowels. The Samaritan is moved in his guts. That’s what fundamentally distinguishes him from the priest and the Levite, not that he offers the care.
To the first hearers of the tale it would perhaps have been clearer. The priest and the Levite acted quite reasonably to them: for reasons with which we are still familiar – fear of dirt, fear of moral pollution – to touch a half-dead man would have revolted them. So what would have stood out is how freely the Samaritan behaves. He is able to respond to a human being, although half-dead. He is not worried about himself, or who the Jew is. He is not tied by any kind of convention. He is free to act. It’s freedom that is the basic message of the story, to respond to another human being. And it does not stop there.
For there’s a remarkable quality to the Samaritan’s freedom. He does not tend to the Jew so as to fulfil a duty, but rather to answer a call. He does not tend to the injured man because he feels he ought to, but because he feels it in his guts. It’s a moment of conversion for the Samaritan. And it results not in a change of beliefs, as if he suddenly realised the Jews weren’t so bad after all. Or because it awakens a sense of responsibility. Rather, the conversion results in the formation of a moving relationship. And the best word for that relationship is friendship.
Friendship, then, is not easy. It’s the love that does not fear, but it is free – so free it disturbs others. When you start to look, you see there are many other stories in the gospels that tell of it.
Think of the woman who throws a jar of costly ointment on Jesus’ feet. It’d have been embarrassing to be present, on account of the emotional excess, though Jesus was free enough in himself to accept it. And there’d have been the disciples’ complaint: the oil should have been sold, and the money given to the poor. Don’t bother her, Jesus replies. Look at this brief moment of free encounter between two human beings.
Another incident is the calling of the disciples themselves, when everything changes as a result of their liberating encounter with the free man, Jesus. His freedom bred freedom.
And then there’s the record of Jesus’ own friendship with the one whom he loved. What must the other disciples have thought about that? We know that they fought amongst themselves. And we’d perhaps have agreed with them, presuming that John’s friendship with Jesus offends agape love, which should be universal and equal, with no favourites. You’re missing the point, says John. I lay on his breast at the supper because with him I was free.
Illich was also fond of the notion of conspiracy. Conspirators are friends who are free enough to cut across established boundaries, even to the point of causing offence. If you want a current example, look at David Cameron and Nick Clegg. But think of the word conspiracy, coming from the Latin conspiratio. Conspirators are ones who conspire, who breathe together. There’s something strikingly incarnational in that. True friends are those who share the same spirit and the same breath.
My sense is that the early Christian community was so unusual because they were conspirators. They were individuals who were free enough in themselves to become friends regardless of social norms – Jews, Greeks, men, women, slaves and freemen, and so on. A lot of the New Testament references to friendship come in John’s gospel and it’s thought that his community might have been known as friends, before they were known as Christians. It was the quality of the friendship they shared that struck people around them.
The notion was captured in the original significance of the kiss of peace. Up until fairly recently, individuals would share the peace physically, literally risking the stink of each other’s breath. Today we don’t share the kiss of peace, but shake hands. It seems sensible, less challenging. But it’s less free too, and perhaps it risks one of the subtle perversions of Christianity that exercised Illich. For a handshake holds the other at a distance. We can see their eyes, and so assess them. It’s a calculated greeting – not acting freely towards another, but only insofar as is appropriate. It wasn’t the greeting of the good Samaritan.
In fact, a history of the handshake should be written. It would be a very Christian project. The handshake was first introduced, I think, in the late seventeenth century, in England. Visiting Frenchmen found the disappearance of the kiss disturbing, as if an epidemic of distrust was abroad. It seemed profoundly unfriendly. They laughed at the constrained proclivities of the English. Conversely, within a generation or two, Englishmen began to see the liberal practice of two men kissing as a foreign and distasteful act, polluting.
Just how free friendship is can also be seen if you think about the ethics of friendship. In an important sense it’s unethical because it does not follow the dictates of duty or obligation. It cuts across the law, and follows its guts. This characteristic has been noted warily by moral philosophers. Immanuel Kant, for example, thought that there couldn’t be friendship in heaven. It’s too risky. After all, if you allow conspirators to breathe into each others’ mouths, they might form cabals and gangs. Alternatively, if someone says you are my friend, they might also say someone else is not my friend, and perhaps even that someone else again is our enemy. Kant did not like the freedom of friendship and for good reasons. Instead, he hoped that a time would come on earth in which we learnt to treat all equally.
Perhaps he would have regarded the NHS as a step in the right direction. But for all the obvious and massive good the NHS does, it also presents a tremendous risk. It turns the compassion that stirs in your guts into an impersonal machine that must deliver mercy on demand. Instead of friendship, it has targets. It’s free at the point of delivery, but in terms of what it does to relationships, it can be very costly. This is what Illich means by a perversion of Christianity. In the name of a great good, the main point is missed and occluded.
It’s not just welfarism that’s a problem. Think of an issue like justice. On one level, we want to champion justice, for all the obvious reasons. But perhaps we need to rethink that notion too. For justice has become another demand, a set of laws, a right. And it’s notably different to the ancient notion. For Aristotle, justice was, in a sense, failed friendship. When the friends of the ancient city-state went to the courts, they’d lost the sense that they were in it together, in that argumentative enterprise called democracy. They’d forgotten that their good was found with others, that they needed one another. Today, I suspect that our notion of justice quite deliberately pits one person against another, the poor against the rich, the powerless against the powerful. We are ushering in a kingdom of combatants, not a community who are free to be friends.
Note how thoroughly ambivalent these ‘perversions’ are. They are not simply bad. They are corrupting in a more subtle sense. Something is lost – freedom and friendship – and my suspicion is that this is what needs to be rediscovered. It’s not a doing thing – do justice, do caring. It’s a being thing. That’s what is so astonishing about individuals like Nelson Mandela, or Desmond Tutu, or Mother Theresa. What they did and do comes from who they are, like the good Samaritan. And that’s not easy, fundamentally because you need to be free to be like them. For most of us, it’s hard enough to be free enough to encounter someone whom we know and love, let alone someone is unknown, strange and different.
But it matters. In terms of the Christian story, nothing less than the incarnation is at stake – incarnation being another word for love that dwells freely amongst us, that befriends us, that shares our breath.
I, of course, have no easy answers, not being very free myself. Though, I suspect that having easy answers is part of the problem. We need more of a challenge from Christianity than the easy calls in which it can trade, if it’s to speak to our humanity so as to enlarge it. Friendship is one place where that challenge can be worked out afresh and, at the risk of sounding like a preacher, some of the clues are right there in the New Testament, in stories like that of the Good Samaritan. It’d be great if the Isaiah Community could help rediscover such freedom, in the community of friends it seeks to forge. It’ll be hard because there’s a fine line to be pursued in matters like care and justice; and because it’ll depend upon the quality of our freedom with one another; to be friends, as the good Samaritan was with the injured Jew.
