Replace fear with confidence in friendship with God

Belief in God is rejected by some on the grounds that it is both intellectually puerile and emotionally demeaning. On this view, the very idea of God entails, at best, infantilism, at worst, slavish subservience because, however much God’s goodness is emphasised by believers, he is still, by definition, our master, and we, by implication, are his serfs. Belief in God, in other words, sits ill with our dignity as autonomous adults. That view is surely undermined by this gospel, in which Jesus explicitly and unambiguously says: “I shall no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business; I call you friends”.

Belief in God would indeed be undignified and infantile if God were, to use a phrase of Herbert McCabe, ‘a celestial Louis XIV’, entailing that we, however willing or compliant, are his lackeys. But this gospel makes plain that God’s creation of us was not an act of condescension, much less enslavement: he created us in order to share his life with us in the equality of friendship and thus to draw us into his own relationship with his Father. Hence, he says: “I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I learnt from my Father.” In Aquinas’s view, friendship, in which the good of the other becomes our own good, is the defining core of all genuine love. That’s why he says that caritas, love, the greatest of the virtues and the form of all the others, is friendship with God. And by ‘love’, he means what St John says in the second reading, namely, that it is primarily “not our love for God, but God’s love for us”.

All genuine love is God’s love, manifest in and through us towards each other. Friendship with God is thus the template for all our relationships, the only lens through which everything and everyone can be viewed accurately and the only measure of love’s authenticity. Friendship, uniquely, affords us space in which to grow and become, not a mirror image of our friends, but our true, unique selves. By creating us, God made possible that primordial space, our very existence, in which to become all that we are called to be. Our creation was his first act of unconditional friendship.

Acknowledging and accepting God’s friendship is not, however, as straightforward as it might seem. On the contrary, we can, under the guise of a certain kind of piety, in subtle ways resist it. As with all friendship, it is more demanding than simply obedience and duty. Friendship undoubtedly creates obligations and duties, but obligation and obedience never created friendship. Where they are obligation, duty and obedience are the primary considerations in our relationship with God, fear all-too easily (and disastrously) displaces love. So what we are unequivocally told in this gospel about friendship with God radically re-configures our understanding of our relationship with him, replacing fear with confidence and slavish obedience with growth over a lifetime in loyalty, love and intimacy.

Importantly, it also implies a much-needed transformation of our understanding of sin from transgression to regression, from disobedience to a failure in love for God, others, and ourselves. In short, this gospel, if taken seriously, de-infantilises our relationship with God.