Friendship vs Distance

When we cultivate friendships with those we serve instead of just seeing them as recipients of our giving, it can get awkward.

Some of the implications of befriending the poor are uncomfortable, even embarrassing:

• Our patterns of consumption become hard to hide
• Our possessions become more visible
• Our assumptions about people who are poor get turned upside down
• Our primary commitments are exposed, and they may not turn out to be what we think or say they are

In other words, there are a lot of reasons to keep distance between ourselves and those who are poor.  Many of them have to do with avoiding the fact that our lifestyles are hard to hide from friends, and much easier to hide from strangers.

So why not just keep the poor strangers? Many of us can recite Jesus’ response to that question in Matthew 25 (“Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did not do for me…”).  As Chris Heuertz and Christine Pohl remind us, friendship with Jesus is at the core of this question.

Jesus offers us friendship, and that gift shapes a surprisingly subversive missional paradigm.  A grateful response to God’s gift of friendship involves offering that same gift to others—whether family or strangers, coworkers or children who live on the street.  Offering and receiving friendship breaks down the barriers of “us” and “them” and opens up possibilities of healing and reconciliation.¹

Friendship offered out of gratitude to God doesn’t need to provoke guilt or shame for what we have (or don’t have).  At the same time, if we’re going to let people get close enough to be friends, we have to open ourselves to the possibility that it might get uncomfortable. That sounds a lot like the incarnation to me.

1. Friendship at the Margins: Discovering Mutuality in Service and Mission, 30. [↩]

©2010 Fuller Youth Institute