One of the things I miss about Finland on cold winter days is the sauna. Finland has six million people and about 2 million saunas. On Saturday nights Finnish electricity rates rise above that of the entire Soviet Union.
Associated with the sauna is the sauna elf. I never saw one. I wanted to meet one when I was there, but never did. They used to be more prevalent. Like American bees, sauna elves are dying off. No one knows why. Some say it's the use of electricity in the sauna. They preferred wood stove saunas. Whatever it is, I would really like to have met one to have as a friend.
Friends are hard to find, and real ones are quite rare. People are friendly in order to get something, or friendly as long as you have something to give. But a real friend is probably rarer than a sauna elf.
28 comments:
Are their friends in the Bible? I can't think of any. Moses didn't have any friends. People had wives. Ahab had Jezebel, for instance. Samson had Delilah. Christ had disciples, but disciples aren't friends.
So what is a friend?
a. sharing an interest (the geographers got together bi-weekly to discuss the local topography and to spin theories, which cemented many people into circles of friendship
b. having another's back. We fought in the war in Vietnam together. We will be friends forever.
c. with a friend like you why would I need enemies?
d. after the ballet, the two girls allowed their shoulders to touch without any kind of self-consciousness
If all friendship is different, then it is no less the case that for the word to mean anything, all friendship must nevertheless be aliek. What is the likeness that underlies all the particulars?
Friendship is founded on inequality. Mutt and Jeff for instance were friends. Friendship is a logical contradiction. Men and women can be friends if they each need the other. And each provide for the others' needs. Friendship is about inequality that turns to equality.
Christ never made any friends in life because he didn't need anybody.
Friendship is based on a lack. It might even be based on a lack of friendship.
True friendship is probably even more rare than true love. Although, on the other hand, all true love must have friendship as its basis.
American history is about the working out of equality, and with that, the friendships that pertain to those of similar interests who help us to attain our version of it.
Can criminals be friends?
Can two rapists be friends?
Can a kidnapper befriend the kidnapped?
Can a boss and an employee be friends?
Can a tiger lie down with the lamb?
Is it easier for two lambs to be friends, or easier for two tigers?
They say that a dog is a man's best friend. On the other hand, many friends are dogs. Can a walrus be one's friend? A mosquito? A virus? An outburst of plague?
Satan can pretend to be our friend.
Friendship might imply a self-sacrifice. It might not.
No one knows what friendship is. It's not considered important. In the entire Bible, I don't think there are any two people who are really friends in the sense in which we think of the term.
Friendship in America is often thought of as business alliances, which implies in turn that if you don't have business interests with a person they are no longer your friend.
Perhaps friendship is an illusory category.
When the dove lands on Christ's head and says, "This is my beloved," is the dove Christ's friend?
Nero had no friends.
Does Obama have any true friends?
Did McCain?
Some people don't need them. Others want to turn everybody into their friend.
Can something like a candle on a lonely winter night be a friend?
A book?
How about a bullet train speeding across France to get you there just in time for the math conference?
My neighborhood in Manila is starring in a movie this week. They're shooting the Bourne Legacy without Matt Damon. I should wander down and try to pick up some work as an extra.
Kirby,
Are their friends in the Bible?
Yes. This is a fairly easy search. I get 95 hits in the NRSV, including some references that are familiar and important. I'll hit a few highlights.
Ruth 4:1 -- the redemption of Ruth by Boaz. Boaz refers to his next of kin (who had the right of redemption) as “friend.”
2 Sam 15:37. Hushai is referred to as David's friend.
1 Kings 5:1. Hiram is referred to as David's friend.
Matt 11:19. Jesus is referred to as “friend of tax collectors and sinners.”
John 11:11. Jesus refers to Lazarus (in the grave) as his friend.
Phil 1. Paul refers to Philemon as a friend.
Christ had disciples, but disciples aren't friends.
Actually, the Matt 11:19 verse argues differently.
Friendship is founded on inequality.
You have a very distorted view of friendship. Friendship is founded on congeniality, that sense of pleasure in the company of another.
Christ never made any friends in life because he didn't need anybody.
Friendship is a universal part of the human experience. Denying friends to Jesus is tantamount to denying his humanity, i.e., the docetist heresy.
Kirby,
Oh, I should have gotten this one the first time. In many ways, it is the best.
Matt 26:50. Jesus refers to Judas as friend. “Friend, do what you are here to do,” at Gethsemane.
Craig - my neighborhood in Los Feliz is in a lot of stuff - random commercials, We Bought A Zoo.
I live in an area of second-and-third-tier celebrities (the chick from That 70s Show who wasn't Mila Kunis, the guy from Office Space who invented the 'Jump to Conclusions' mat...) but my 'hood gets a lot of filming in it.
Yay.
Also, my propertymate is in the most recent 'what happens in vegas stays in vegas' commercial.
Sweet.
That being said, Kirby's views on friendship are strange - I think Kirby is just doing his old thing: "I'm starting to think about friendship and what it means for a Christian...don't really have the time / don't want to spend the time researching it myself...will post a blog where I pretend to have a definitive, one-sided opinion. Stu, GM, and maybe JADL, if he's around, will want to correct me by providing scriptural evidence, and thus they will do all the work for me."
Well played, sir... Well played.
Well, the word appears to occur 95 times, but there are no acts of friendship portrayed in Stu's inventory. Lazarus is dead, for instance. Perhaps what Jesus does for him (bring him back alive) is an act of friendship, but we don't say them playing with an X-box together, or whatever was the contemporary equivalent. I think there is more of a sense of true friendship in our terms in the Greek epics. But now that I scan my mind for examples, I can't find any. Patroclus and Achilles weren't exactly friends. In Clash of the Titans the old playwright befriends PErseus, but that's more or less a contemporary recreation of the story. (Did it have an ancient original?) In Jason and the Argonauts there were many comrades on the ship, but I don't see conversations where people wonder about things, which I see as one of the essentials of friendship. Since Jesus always has the answers, I can't see him doing that with people. He's rather authoritative, and is never about to admit that he doesn't know something. Does he ever do that? Does he ever let the disciples know something that he doesn't know? Friendship is also about vulnerability (which is why it's so dangerous). As I went through the OT this summer there are yes, references to friendship, but no interior accounts of it that I can recall. It's actually a fairly rare thing to find anywhere in literature. Perhaps Sancho Panza if that was his name was a friend in the same way that Yogi Bear had a friend in Bubbalooey (did I get the name right?). But I also think friendship has to have some kind of equality in it. Maybe by dint of their size a Finnish sauna elf is too small to befriend. On the other hand, they have a lot of power, and therefore, that might make up for their small size. They get very mad when people yack in a sauna (you're supposed to shut up and let other people luxuriate in the heat -- anyone who tells a story or starts a conversation in a sauna is virtually a criminal in the eyes of a sauna elf -- who act as a kind of police force of the unwritten rules of sauna taking).
I like Stu's term "congeniality." Even in the Miss America contests there is a prize for Miss Congeniality, which is itself a kind of beauty, I suppose. I don't see anyone in the Bible as having this trait.
At least not as how it would be applied in the Miss America contest.
Brett had some good points. Stu had some good points.
Still, I don't think there is any true interior account of friendship in the Bible.
Most friendships in the Bible or love affairs have a kind of betrayal in them. Ahab and Jezebel and Samson and Delilah are among the most atrocious. Judas' betrayal of Jesus is really stunning, as is St. Peters' betrayal. Jesus forgives them in advance, but it still strikes most of us as quite wrong, and not the way a friend would act.
One other example I just remembered: Job has friends. He has real friends. They even act like real friends. They stay with him a whole week blaming him for his problems.
Kirby do you have friends?
Kirby,
Let me push this further, as Brett would say, doing your work for you.
Considering only the New Testament, the Greek word that most commonly underlies the English word “friend” is φίλος. You'll recall that there are three commonly used words for love in Greek, φιλία (philia, brotherly or earthly love), ἔρως (eros, sexual love), and ἀγάπη (agape, heavenly love). The etymological relationship between φίλος and φιλία is self-evident, and not surprisingly, there is a parallel to ἀγάπη in ἀγαπητός, which is often translated as “beloved,” a word that in English would most often imply sexual intimancy, but which does not convey this in the Greek. The word “beloved” has 76 occurrences in the NRSV New Testament.
It seems to me, from uses, that the Greek word φίλος splits the difference between the English words “companion” and “friend,” while ἀγαπητός splits the difference between “friend” and “best friend,” and is perhaps closest to “dear friend.” I'd be very interested in hearing informed opinion on this.
Still, I don't think there is any true interior account of friendship in the Bible.
I'll grant the point regarding “interior,” as there's little interior discourse of any kind in the Bible. But I do think the Bible, and especially the New Testament, provides unambiguous accounts of friendship.
What do we do with our friends? We hang out with them. We eat and drink with them. We BS with them. We give them funny nicknames like “Rocky.” We tell them what we're going to do when we hit the big time. They're the people we want to be with when we're tired of being with people. You can find all of these things in the relationship between Jesus and his disciples.
I think you've hung too much theological baggage on the word “disciple.” It's important to understand here that the disciples didn't think of Jesus as some sort of God-man, at least not while he was alive. Even Peter's confession of Jesus as Messiah has to be understood as confessing a pre-diaspora Jewish Messiah, which is to say a human figure who would lead Israel out of Roman bondage, not a post-Nicene Christian God-man Messiah. Jesus was to them just this really cool guy who had an inspiring vision of how the world should be and how we should live in it, and they really liked hanging out with him and being a part of what he was doing. The other things—the crucifixion(s), the persecutions, the theology, the travels, the mission—all came later. They were Jesus's friends before they were his apostles.
I have some friends. But I want disciples!
Disciple just means student.
Long day driving over four counties to accomplish various things left me unable to add much to the thread. I do wonder to what extent Jesus saw Judas as a true pal. Even if it was in the cards for Judas to betray Jesus, wouldn't Jesus have felt betrayed? He was, after all, human. This wasn't exactly a play. It was real life. It was dramatic, but it wasn't a drama after which everyone popped open a beer and watched the Flintstones.
To think Jesus couldn't employ sarcasm or irony (all people I think can do this!) is to imply he wasn't fully human, and we're back to Docetism.
you are my friends if you do what i command
jonathan and david - big time friends
jesus made friendship the basic context for transforming the world
and that means sacrifice
elves should learn to have a better understanding of goblins
we'll get nowhere until that happens
let's start a new political party
the friendship party
a lover once told me we should just be friends
i told her to go to hell
what's a christian to do
jesus is a pretty good friend
but oftimes he's just crucified
fly the friendly skyse
why bother with friends when
you can have acquaintances
job had some friends
what are some famous historical friendships
one could read the whole of the gospel of john as a testimony to sacred friendship
what about cold plunges
after saunas
do the elves believe in that?
so many questions
so little time
i like saunas
elves steal my money
jh
you are my friends if you do what i command
jonathan and david - big time friends
jesus made friendship the basic context for transforming the world
and that means sacrifice
elves should learn to have a better understanding of goblins
we'll get nowhere until that happens
let's start a new political party
the friendship party
a lover once told me we should just be friends
i told her to go to hell
what's a christian to do
jesus is a pretty good friend
but oftimes he's just crucified
fly the friendly skyse
why bother with friends when
you can have acquaintances
job had some friends
what are some famous historical friendships
one could read the whole of the gospel of john as a testimony to sacred friendship
what about cold plunges
after saunas
do the elves believe in that?
so many questions
so little time
i like saunas
elves steal my money
jh
I like JH's addition of the term "sacrifice" as an aspect of friendship. Peter denies knowing Christ. Judas turns his back on him for thirty pieces of silver. This seems to be quintessentially unfriendly, even if some traditions have Judas killing himself later in repentance or out of overwhelming guilt. St. Paul and many of the others end up martyred. This seems like true friendship. I think almost no one knows what friendship is any longer. Let's rediscover it. The true avant-garde is not the avant-garde as founded on Sade, but on Schweitzer and kindness. The true avant-garde is based on Helen Keller. I just fell over the couch. As I was saying, I think it's based on decency and respect for others, the ten commandments, and walking on water. Or is it linoleum. I just tripped on a toy. Ka-boom. Tiny invisible acts of mercy. My finger just went into the socket. What is the tiniest act of mercy in the Bible that is still countable? I don't mean the big things like bringing Lazarus back to life. I mean, pass me a lump of sugar. Or, here's a periwinkle. Well, I am deaf dumb and blind. Well, you can still smell. Smell it. It smells bad. Hey, I thought you couldn't talk. I can't, but I can type.
Can a Christian be friends with a Satanist?
I went to junior high and high school in a navy town, except for my senior year when I traded in the navy's aircraft carrier dry dock/nuclear submarine base for NASA's mission control.
The high school I graduated from had been a private Quaker academy from the time of the hurricane that flattened Galveston in 1900 until 1961 when Kennedy imitated Jackie Gleason, and told us we were all going to the moon with Christopher Robin and Alice. Homecoming in 1971 was fascinating as we honored the class of '51 and got 100% attendance from the honorees. All 7 of them.
We were all Friends then because that's how Friends do things. The school was public when I went there, but all the land in town that wasn't owned by astronauts still belonged to the Quakers. Prayers at graduation and before every football game were led by Baptist ministers. Quakers don't pray, at least not out loud. It's considered unseemly. Most of my Friends were Presbyterian or Episcopalian. I was sort of an honorary Methodist because the Methodists had United in 1970 with my grandfather's denomination, the EUB. There were a few Mormons, but I don't remember any Lutherans. My English teacher was Catholic.
Before we moved to Houston we lived in a house with five acres of horse pasture for our horses. I could ride to the country club golf course and swimming pool on my bike and often did. Directly across the street from our house was an elementary school with a terrific playground and two baseball diamonds. Now it's owned by the Lutherans.
Kirby,
I concur that sacrifice can be an important part of the notion of friendship.
But I'd like to take issue first with your characterization of Peter. Peter is credited by John (18:10) as having wielded the sword in Jesus's defense, only to have had Jesus ask him to put it down “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father gave me?” So Peter only ran when he couldn't fight, and if his denials later that evening are mark against him, he repaid this many times over later in his life. He was indeed the rock that the church was built upon. It is telling of the quality of your argument that you list St. Paul as a martyr, but not also St. Peter, who likely died with him. Peter was a good friend to Jesus.
As for Judas, there is much to say. Certainly, his story is not told by his friends. John 12:6 characterizes him as being both the treasurer of Jesus's band, and a petty thief. The latter strikes me as gratuitous post-hoc villification rather than history (AFAIK, the synoptics don't make this accusation). But there are much more sympathetic interpretations possible, cf., Robert Graves's "King Jesus." But taking something of a middle road, I think it most likely that what we know of Caiaphas's argument (John 11:50: “... it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed”) came into the tradition through Judas himself—this seems a likely argument for him to have used to try justify himself to the other disciples after the fact, and indeed the theology of the crucifixion acknowledges the essential truth of Caiaphas's claim, albeit with a significance he wouldn't have anticipated. Jesus certainly had a perspective from which he could both honor and condemn Judas; both for the truth that Judas held onto, and for his fundamental betrayal.
Sometime, friends betray you. Sometimes this means a break in the friendship; sometimes it does not. Much depends on the reaction of the disadvantaged friend. It's not unreasonable to hear irony in Jesus's use of the word "friend" in addressing Judas at Gethsemene. But that's not what I hear. I hear sadness, resignation, and a rebuke, but also hear a re-affirmation of friendship, and a calling.
I'm friends with a pagan.
Like a "I worship the god of war" pagan.
It's. . . odd.
We avoid religion generally. I try to be a good image of Christ, etc. I think it would be un-Christian in the extreme to unfriend him just because his beliefs have changed.
"the people we want to be with when we're tired of being with people."
Is that from something, Stu? Cause if not, and you just made that up, it's got bumper-sticker / desk-calendar / inspirational-poster / facebook status update written all over it...
Whether or not people can act in an altruistic fashion has been a very old and long contention. Within Christianity there are various views. Some denominations such as the Catholics and the Greek and Russian Orthodox believe in saints. Saints are people who are selfless, like Mother Theresa. Others, like the Lutherans, believe that there is always a remainder of the Fall in every action so that they do not believe that a person can really be 100% altruistic. They might argue that the saint is really just showing off, but inside it's a different story.
The Marxist writer named Christopher Hitchens claimed that Mother Theresa wanted to keep the Indians poor so as to be able to mother them.
Is this accurate? I don't know. I think it's possible to be decent, but I don't think it's possible to be a saint. At least not for me!
It's possible for me to be a decent friend I think, but the basis of this is following the ten commandments which are the outline of neighborliness. I don't think we should be friends with anyone who isn't following the Ten or who doesn't think they are essential.
Christ may have sensed the genuine remorse that would come for Judas as well as for Peter. With that, it's ok. He could forgive them. But people who break the laws because they don't even think laws matter should not be friended, I believe. Or forgiven. The sins of the fathers in that case shall fall upon their children until the third or fourth generation.
Brett,
"the people we want to be with when we're tired of being with people."
Is that from something, Stu?
My own koanage ;-).
I thought it was superb too.
Personally I think we should finish the sauna elves. They give the hot tub trolls a bad name.
All I know is that I use my daily time in the sauna at the Y for meditation. I haven't encountered any elves, but there is one woman who enjoys the sauna naked but refuses to sit on a towel. I wish an elf would hit her over the head with a well heated rock.
I don't have time to comment much but I'm amazed. The sermon today at my church took apart Jesus' answer to what is the greatest commandment. It involved a compare and contrast to what "love" meant in Jesus' time to the romantic notion we hold today. The sermon touched upon many of the issues in the above comments from JH, Stu, and others. Maybe Kirby's pastor is on the same lectionary schedule as mine is.
I really liked JH's comments.
Wendy
All I know is that I use my daily time in the sauna at the Y for meditation. I haven't encountered any elves, but there is one woman who enjoys the sauna naked but refuses to sit on a towel. I wish an elf would hit her over the head with a well heated rock.
I don't have time to comment much but I'm amazed. The sermon today at my church took apart Jesus' answer to what is the greatest commandment. It involved a compare and contrast to what "love" meant in Jesus' time to the romantic notion we hold today. The sermon touched upon many of the issues in the above comments from JH, Stu, and others. Maybe Kirby's pastor is on the same lectionary schedule as mine is.
I really liked JH's comments.
Wendy
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