The Friendship of Christ
One category in which to think about the heart of Christ is that of friendship. His heart takes shape as our never-failing friend. This was a common way to understand Christ more in past generations than today.
We need not even retreat to historic or even Christian authors to learn that we today have lamentably impoverished the category even of friendship between humans, perhaps especially among men. Richard Godbeer, professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, has shown through an extensive review of written correspondence that male friendship has been greatly diluted in the present time when compared with the richness of healthy, nonerotic affection between men in colonial America.[1]
But if we allow the world around us in our present cultural moment to dictate to us the significance of friendship, we not only lose out on a reality vital to human flourishing at the horizontal level; we lose out, even worse, on enjoying the friendship of Christ at a vertical level.
FRIEND TO SINNERS
One of the most arresting references to Christ’s friendship comes just before the lodestar text of our study in Matthew 11:28–30. In Matthew 11:19 Jesus quotes his accusers as contemptibly calling him “a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (that is, a friend of the most despicable kinds of sinners known in that culture). And as is often the case in the Gospels—such as when the demons say, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24), or when Satan himself acknowledges Christ to be “the Son of God” (Luke 4:9)—it is not his disciples but his antagonists who most clearly perceive who he is.
Though the crowds call him the friend of sinners as an indictment, the label is one of unspeakable comfort for those who know themselves to be sinners. That Jesus is friend to sinners is only contemptible to those who feel themselves not to be in that category.
What does it mean that Christ is a friend to sinners? At the very least, it means that he enjoys spending time with them. It also means that they feel welcome and comfortable around him.
Notice the passing line that starts off a series of parables in Luke: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him” (Luke 15:1). The very two groups of people whom Jesus is accused of befriending in Matthew 11 are those who can’t stay away from him in Luke 15. They are at ease around him. They sense something different about him. Others hold them at arms’ length, but Jesus offers the enticing intrigue of fresh hope. What he is really doing, at bottom, is pulling them into his heart.
Consider your own relational circle. Doubtless the line of who your friends are could be drawn in varying places, like concentric circles narrowing in to a bull’s-eye. There are some people in our lives whose name we know, but they’re really on the periphery of our affections. Others are closer to the middle, but perhaps not intimate friends. Continuing to move toward the center, some of us are blessed to have a particularly close friend or two, someone who really knows us and “gets” us, someone for whom it is simply a mutual delight to be in each other’s company. To many of us, God has given a spouse as our closest earthly friend.
Even walking through this brief thought experiment, of course, ignites pockets of mental pain. Some of us are forced to acknowledge that we do not have one true friend, someone we could go to with any problem knowing we would not be turned away. Who in our lives do we feel safe with—really safe, safe enough to open up about everything?
FRIENDS FOREVER
Here is the promise of the gospel and the message of the whole Bible: In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence. This is a companion whose embrace of us does not strengthen or weaken depending on how clean or unclean, how attractive or revolting, how faithful or fickle, we presently are. The friendliness of his heart for us subjectively is as fixed and stable as is the declaration of his justification of us objectively.
Won’t most of us admit that even with our best friends, we don’t feel fully comfortable divulging everything about our lives? We like them, and even love them, and go on vacation with them, and sing their praises to others—but we don’t really, at the deepest heart level, entrust ourselves to them. Even in many of our marriages, we are friends of a sort, but we haven’t gotten naked in soul the way we have in body.
What if you had a friend at the center of the bull’s-eye of your relationship circle, whom you knew would never raise his eyebrows at what you share with him, even the worst parts of you? All our human friendships have a limit to what they can withstand. But what if there were a friend with no limit? No ceiling on what he would put up with and still want to be with you? “All the kinds and degrees of friendship meet in Christ,” wrote Richard Sibbes.[2]
Consider the depiction of the risen Christ in Revelation 3. There he says (to a group of Christians who are “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked,” v. 17): “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door”—what will Christ do?— “I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (v. 20).
Jesus wants to come in to you—wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, naked you—and enjoy meals together. Spend time with you. Deepen the acquaintance. With a good friend, you don’t need to constantly fill in all gaps of silence with words. You can just be warmly present together, quietly relishing each other’s company. “Mutual communion is the soul of all true friendship,” wrote Thomas Goodwin, “and a familiar converse with a friend has the greatest sweetness in it.”[3]
FEAST WITH OUR FRIEND
We should not overly domesticate Jesus here. He is not just any friend. A few chapters earlier in Revelation we see a depiction of Christ so overwhelming to John that he falls down, immobilized (1:12–16). But neither should we dilute the humanness, the sheer relational desire, clearly present in these words from the mouth of the risen Christ himself.
He isn’t waiting for you to trigger his heart; he is already standing at the door, knocking, wanting to come in to you.
What’s our job? “Our duty,” says Sibbes, “is to accept of Christ’s inviting of us. What will we do for him, if we will not feast with him?”[4]
[1] Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2009).
[2] Richard Sibbes, Bowels Opened, Or, A Discovery of the Near and Dear Love, Union, and Communion Between Christ and the Church, in The Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. A. B. Grosart, 7 vols. (repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1983), 2:36.
[3] Thomas Goodwin, Of Gospel Holiness in the Heart and Life, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, 12 vols. (repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage, 2006), 7:197.
[4] Sibbes, Bowels Opened, 2:34.
Content taken from Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, ©2020. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, crossway.org.
Dane C. Ortlund (PhD, Wheaton College) is chief publishing officer and Bible publisher at Crossway. He serves as an editor for the Knowing the Bible series and the Short Studies in Biblical Theology series, and is the author of several books, including Gentle and Lowly and Edwards on the Christian Life. He is an elder at Naperville Presbyterian Church in Naperville, Illinois. Dane lives with his wife, Stacey, and their five children in Wheaton, Illinois.