Jesus Is Not Just My Homeboy: A Friendship Christology

Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 10. No. 1 (2021): 158–175

Jesus Is Not Just My Homeboy:

A Friendship Christology

Justin Bronson Barringer

T ONE POINT WHEN IT was kind of trendy, I often wore a hat

that said, “Jesus is My Homeboy.” I honestly miss that hat.

For years, because of the depleted state of both the concept

and realities of friendship in the church, I did not have lan-

guage to talk about the way I believed that Jesus liked me and did not

just love me in some vague, general, disinterested, sense. At the time,

the best I could do was use the language of my hat to talk about him

as my homeboy. Now, thankfully, I have discovered the rich tradition

in the church of talking about friendship with and among the Triune

God. What I have yet to see is an attempt to talk about standard topics

within Christology as they relate to such friendship. It is my intent,

then, to attempt to bring the classical conversations on friendship into

the service of themes in Christology including the incarnation, life,

death, and resurrection of Jesus, as well as his eternal place in the Trin-

ity, and his ascension and anticipated return in the Parousia.

The essay has four primary sections. The first addresses the possi-

bility of naming Jesus as the megalopsychos envisioned by Aristotle,

as a way of asserting that this would make him the one with whom all

humanity should want to be friends. I explore how the kenotic act of

Jesus described in Philippians 2 might open up the possibility for de-

scribing Jesus as the truest version of the megalopsychos precisely be-

cause he took on the form of the mikropsychos. The second section,

builds on the first by exploring how this great friend Jesus creates a

new form of civic life that centers around friendship, and how this new

civic community is exemplified in Jesus when he is named “friend of

sinners.” The third section explores how Jesus as the second person of

the Trinity, one in Trinitarian friendship, can open up ways for us to

understand friends as other selves. The fourth section asserts that Jesus

has invited all of us into friendship through declaring the disciples as

his friends. In the conclusion, I revisit each of these themes by ground-

ing them in biblical stories about Jesus’s interactions with two of his

friends, Judas who betrayed him and Peter who denied him, in hopes

of solidifying friendship as among the central concepts that makes

Christianity intelligible and thus one of the most appropriate ways to

talk about Jesus and the various doctrines in Christology.

Jesus is Not Just My Homeboy 159

JESUS AS MEGALOPSYCHOS AND PHILIPPIANS 2 (INCARNATION/

DEATH)

Aristotle had a description of the human ideal, the sort of person

with whom one would want to be friends, one whom he called megal-

opsychos.

Christians think of Jesus as the human ideal, the new

Adam, the one to whom rightly is ascribed all glory, honor, and praise.

Thus, the question arises, is Jesus the megalopsychos Aristotle envi-

sioned? Much of the Christian tradition has rejected the possibility

outright as it seems that Aristotle is describing nothing other than a

pride-filled attention seeker. I want to interrogate this position and

reexamine the extent to which Jesus might indeed be called megal-

opsychos, and the way in which Jesus’s apparent adoption of its sup-

posed deformation, mikropsychia, in both the Incarnation itself and in

his crucifixion, might have in fact secured his place as the truest meg-

alopsychos, and thus the best possible friend.

Aristotle offered four criteria necessary for megalopsychia. First,

is the virtue of “the one who thinks himself worthy of great things and

is really worthy of them.”

Aristotle essentially sums up this trait as

greatness, particularly greatness in the virtues. Second, “[megalopsy-

chia]…would seem to be a sort of adornment [crown] of the virtues;

for it makes them greater, and it does not arise without them.”

In other

words, the person who is megalopsychos is full of all the virtues and

is thus truly good. Third, as it is implied in the first, the person with

megalopsychia has a deep self-knowledge, and thus can make an ac-

curate assessment of oneself. And fourth, according to Suzanne Stern-

Gillet, the megalopsychos “is a man capable of the highest kind of

friendship, namely the friendship of virtue.”

I would like to take each point in turn and scrutinize it in conver-

sation with the description of Jesus given in Philippians 2. There is no

question that Jesus is worthy of great things. Numerous pericopes in

Scripture attest to this fact, including Philippians 2:5–11, which at its

beginning and its end declares Jesus’s greatness. However, immedi-

ately in verse six we see that Jesus did not seem to understand himself

as being worthy of the greatness of divinity, though he was homoou-

sios with God. This would seem to disqualify Jesus from being meg-

alopsychos because he does not grasp at the greatness he shares with

Megalopsychia (also transliterated as megalopsuchia) is a virtue. The megalopsy-

chos is the person who possesses the virtue. Likewise, mikropsychia is a trait (for

Aristotle a vice), and the mikropsychos is the person who possesses the trait.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IV.3, 1123b3.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IV.3, 1124a16.

Suzanne Stern-Gillet, “Souls Great and Small: Aristotle on Self-Knowledge, Friend-

ship, and Civic Engagement,” in Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship, ed.

Suzanne Stern-Gillet and Gary M. Gurtler (Albany: State University of New York

Press, 2014), 67.

160 Justin Bronson Barringer

Father and Spirit. Jesus does not seem concerned with receiving honor

and seems to give up his place of honor. In fact, that might even make

Jesus a better picture of Aristotle’s mikropsychos, “someone whose

desires and ambitions are more modest than they should be and whose

achievements, as a result, fall short of the highest.”

Certainly the de-

scription of Jesus’s lowly life and shameful death in verses 7–8 attests

to this claim. However, neither Aristotle’s description nor Jesus’s

story ends there. Before returning to the possibilities that lie in the next

part of Aristotle’s understanding of megalopsychia and the continua-

tion of Jesus’s narrative, in order to seek some resolution, I will first

examine some other possible connections based on the next three of

Aristotle’s characteristics of megalopsychia listed above.

In Philippians 2, Jesus is set up as the exemplar, the one who is

truly good. I do not have space here to enumerate all of the ways that

Jesus embodies each of Aristotle’s other virtues, ranging from pru-

dence to temperance, justice to courage, and friendliness to truthful-

ness, but I contend that he indeed did (and does) so. In his virtue, Jesus

also, it seems, takes on megalopsychia by lavishly sharing his virtue,

imparting and imputing it through righteousness, even sharing in

abundance all the wealth of God.

In the verses leading up to this pe-

ricope of Philippians, the writer suggests that Jesus pours out encour-

agement, love, joy, affection, and sympathy as the One who exempli-

fies looking to the interests of others. Jesus’s megalopsychia indeed

arises out of his greatness, in both the general sense and in the sense

of his virtue, and crowns his greatness and virtue by lavishly sharing

them with others. It seems that Jesus easily meets this second criterion

in that he is full of virtue, truly good, and great also in generosity.

However, this raises some other questions about one who is megal-

opsychos. “Is his virtuous self-sufficiency so great as to make the for-

mation of personal ties redundant? Can he be counted upon to engage

readily in the association that Aristotle calls ‘civic friendship?’”

The

first of these questions will be addressed at the end of this section, and

the second in the next section.

The question of self-knowledge is both fundamentally a question

of ontology (what/who one is) and epistemology (how one knows).

Jesus, according to Philippians 2, knows he is homoousios with God,

answering the ontological question. But for my purposes here, it is the

epistemological question that is more important for the discussion at

hand. Jesus is full of self-knowledge, perhaps the most important of

which, for our purposes here, is that he is in full relationship with Fa-

ther and Spirit, not standing alone in greatness. This self-knowledge,

Stern-Gillet, “Souls Great and Small,” 69.

2 Corinthians 5:21.

Stern-Gillet, “Souls Great and Small,” 52.

Jesus is Not Just My Homeboy 161

via friendship with the Father and the Spirit, is what enables his hum-

ble giving because he trusts completely the will of the Father and the

power of the Spirit. In other words, Jesus knows who and what he is

because he is in relationship with the Father and Spirit.

I argue that it

is precisely this self-knowledge that makes Jesus capable of full self-

giving. It is his full trust in the Father and Spirit, the only among his

equals, that allows Jesus to take on what seems to be, and might actu-

ally be, the embodiment of the shameful mikropsychia.

According to Stern-Gillet, “The Aristotelian mikropsychos is

someone who, although blessed with the goods of fortune and natural

ability, consistently shies away from public involvement. Rather than

putting his talents and assets at the service of the state, he chooses to

lead a retiring life in the course of which he remains unconcerned with

public affairs.”

This could certainly be an apt reading of Jesus’s life

and ministry. For instance, in John 6:15 the people try to make Jesus

king by force, but instead he retreats to pray. In Jesus’s three tempta-

tions during his encounter with Satan, it seems to be revealed that Je-

sus has all power and authority, yet he does not choose to use them to

immediately fix the world’s social and political problems. Rather, Je-

sus is crucified by the state with a sign mockingly noting that he

claimed to be King of the Jews. On such a reading, it would seem that

Jesus does indeed epitomize Aristotle’s mikropsychia. Jesus’s cruci-

fixion seems to be the pinnacle of shame and proof of his failure to be

megalopscyhos and thus nothing more than mikropsychos.

However, a combination of Stern-Gillet’s reading of Aristotle on

self-love and sacrifice along with the latter part of Philippians 2 tips

the scale in the other direction. Stern-Gillet writes, “I shall now argue,

on the basis of chapter 8 of book IX of the Nicomachean [ethics], that

the megalopsychos, although no ‘lover of danger,’ would nevertheless

be prepared, if the need arose, to lay down his life ‘for his friends and

for his native land.’”

This contention is based on Aristotle’s argu-

ment about self-love, which I suggest directly corresponds to self-

knowledge, and its relation, then, to virtuous friendship. Aristotle

wrote,

We must love most the friend who is most a friend; and one person is

a friend to another most of all if he wishes goods to the other for the

other’s sake, even if no one will know about it. But these are features

most of all of one’s relation to oneself; and so too are all other defining

E.g., Luke 22:42.

Stern-Gillet, “Souls Great and Small,” 75.

Yet, of course, in Christian theology we believe that this is also when Jesus is en-

throned as King.

Stern-Gillet, “Souls Great and Small,” 65. This bears a striking resemblance to Je-

sus’s words in John 15:13 about laying down one’s life for one’s friends as the greatest

example of love.

162 Justin Bronson Barringer

features of a friend, since we have said that all the features of friend-

ship extend from oneself to others.

That being the case, it seems that the truly megalopsychos man is that

one who is most able to extend his love of self to others, as one who

“will readily sacrifice his comfort or safety to assist his friends…. [H]e

will even be prepared to lay down his life for them.”

In our Philippi-

ans pericope we see Jesus doing just this in his obedience to the Father,

even to the point of death on the cross. In that case, Jesus’s shameful

death on behalf of his friends actually adds to claims about his megal-

opsychia rather than claims about his being mikropsychos.

Furthermore, Stern-Gillet’s argument lines up with the verses of

the Philippians 2 pericope. She writes, “At this point Aristotle’s argu-

ment begins to take the appearance of a paradox. Even when the vir-

tuous self-lover consents to the ultimate sacrifice, so Aristotle avers,

he still stands to benefit.”

Essentially, according to Aristotle, the

megalopsychos man benefits others and in turn receives benefit

through honor and praise. Stern-Gillet continues:

The paradox comes through a few lines later, when Aristotle contends

that the beneficiaries of noble actions are not restricted to the agent’s

philoi and city, but that the self-sacrificial agent, too, stands to benefit.

Even if he were to lose his life, he would gain the (internal) good of

virtue and the (external) good of honor…. Appearances to the contrary

notwithstanding, [Aristotle] concludes that the self-sacrificial agent is,

in this case, a gainer as well as a loser, and what he gains is greater

than what he loses.

Jesus gives up his life on the cross for the good of his friends and his

country (the Kingdom of God), which may seem like a loss, but Phi-

lippians 2:9–11 tells us that he has now been lifted up to the highest

place and that all of creation will praise him.

Thus, as it relates to his

self-knowledge, self-love, and self-sacrifice, rather than stand in an-

tithesis to Aristotle’s megalopsychos, Jesus actually epitomizes it pre-

cisely because he was willing to take on the appearance of the mikro-

psychos in the incarnation and crucifixion.

If what Ann Ward says about Derrida’s interpretation of Aristotle’s

view on friendship and politics is true, then the crucifixion is indeed

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IX.8, 1168b2.

Stern-Gillet, “Souls Great and Small,” 66. The second great command in Matthew

22:39, which Jesus fulfills, is to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Also, again see John

15:13.

Stern-Gillet, “Souls Great and Small,” 66.

Stern-Gillet, “Souls Great and Small,” 66–67.

Hebrews 12:2 tells us that the joy set before him helped Jesus to endure the cross.

Jesus is Not Just My Homeboy 163

the ultimate political act and the proof of his rightful claim to be meg-

alopsychos. She writes that “Derrida, drawing on the Eudemian Eth-

ics, argues that for Aristotle the ‘properly political act’ creates ‘the

most friendship possible.’”

At the moment of Jesus’s death on the

cross, the temple curtain was torn from top to bottom. This event

opened up all of humanity to the possibility of friendship with God

and through that one friendship to friendship with every other person.

Before concluding this section, I want to take one more look at

Stern-Gillet’s summary of Aristotle’s megalopsychia. She writes,

Viewed from the perspective of [Aristotle’s treatises], the megalopsy-

chos is best understood as an asset to any city-state with a sound con-

stitution, although an aristocratic regime in which government is in

the hands of the best among the citizens would give him the greatest

opportunity for putting his overall excellence at the service of the po-

lis. To the polis he gives much, both of his wealth and his person, by

consistently acting in such a way as to promote the end of the political

society, which, in Aristotle’s viewpoint, is the performance of noble

actions and the realization of the good life for all the citizens. To this

end, the city must seek to achieve a high level of political and eco-

nomic self-sufficiency as well as to instill into all its citizens the val-

ues which will enable them to fulfill their potentialities as rational be-

ings.

It seems to me that this is an apt description of Jesus, excepting a

few important revisions. Jesus as megalopsychos, redefined as one fo-

cused on the basileia (kingdom) and ecclesia rather than the polis, and

the adoption of at least mikropsychia as apparent modus operandi in

the Incarnation and Crucifixion, is thus the one who is best suited for

friendship and the one who makes the most friendship possible be-

cause he invites everyone to become friends with God, and thus

friends with all other friends of God. In this truth, then, Jesus meets

the final of Aristotle’s criteria as one who is megalopsychos; namely,

Jesus is the one who is the most capable of virtuous friendship.

Ra-

ther than his virtue making the ties of friendship redundant, he extends

his virtue to all humanity, in obedience to the Father, by giving the gift

of the Spirit, and the gift of himself as both exemplar and propitiating

sacrifice. Thus, the ties are not redundant because they flow from his

very nature as a giver of gifts, and in creating humanity, though un-

Ann Ward, Contemplating Friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics (Albany: State Univer-

sity of New York Press, 2016), 12.

Stern-Gillet, “Souls Great and Small,” 74–75.

Though Stern-Gillet contends that the megalopsychos is full of pride, I would con-

tend that Jesus demonstrated how humility enables the most noble course of action,

and likewise that Jesus may not have rested on his own pride, but was indeed empow-

ered by the pride of the Father in him (e.g., Matthew 3:17).

164 Justin Bronson Barringer

necessary to God, Jesus now has a new avenue through which to be-

stow the gift of friendship that he already shares with the Father and

the Spirit. Jesus’s self-sacrificial gift, as we shall see next, makes pos-

sible a Christian understanding of civic friendship.

JESUS AS FRIEND OF SINNERS AND CIVIC FRIENDSHIP (LIFE)

When Jesus’s enemies called him “friend of sinners” they were at-

tempting to shame him, perhaps in a way not too dissimilar from call-

ing him mikropsychos. Jesus’s accusers pointed to him as one who

would rather spend time cavorting with those who shamefully had no

political power than get on with the good work of politics with the

‘right’ people. He, it seems, preferred friendship to justice. That is not

to say that Jesus is unconcerned about justice, but rather that in addi-

tion to justice, friendship is needed to maintain social harmony. This

is why, according to Aristotle, “Lawgivers are more serious about

[friendship] than about justice.”

Thus, friendship is imperative for

healthy civic life, life together with others, and Jesus is the friend who

shows us what that life looks like, refocuses the central locus of civic

life, and does so by entering into friendships with reckless abandon so

that by becoming the friend of sinners (even taking on their identity

by becoming their sin), he can make them righteous participants in his

new political community.

Perhaps all of this is why the telos for hu-

manity, for people like Aquinas, is friendship rather than justice.

Paul Wadell is right to say that for Aristotle, at least, “[t]he goal of

the moral life is not just the virtuous person, but the virtuous commu-

nity.”

This, in part, is why I think it is important that Jesus was not

merely a reclusive ascetic, but one who partied with sinners to the ex-

tent that he was called a glutton and drunkard, and more importantly,

their friend. Wadell notes that while Aristotle’s discussion in the Ni-

comachean Ethics begins by trying to connect morality and politics,

Aristotle shifts the discussion to friendship. What is intriguing about

Wadell’s reading is that he suggests that Aristotle realizes that his

hopes for the polis are essentially in vain and thus the moral life cannot

be centered in the city-state, but must instead be centered in friendship

and family. Wadell writes,

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a24, quoted in Ward, Contemplating Friend-

ship, 82. Lawmakers realize that friendship is the basic thread that holds society to-

gether and that friendship, rightly conceived and lived, included justice as one of its

necessary aspects. Thus, friendship was a higher goal that demanded justice but also

went beyond Aristotle’s conception of it to create a community of people who actually

like each other on top of treating one another justly.

2 Corinthians 5:21.

Paul Wadell, Friendship and the Moral Life (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre

Dame Press, 1989), 46.

Jesus is Not Just My Homeboy 165

Precisely because the city-state no longer enables but actually frus-

trates the acquisition and nurturing of the virtues, Aristotle searches

for another way to develop them, and his search takes him to friend-

ship. By the end of the Nicomachean Ethics friendship has replaced

the polis as the context in which the virtues are learned and embod-

ied.

Wadell then suggests that Aristotle might want his readers to reread

the Ethics through the lens of friendship.

Notably, Wadell writes,

This is not to suggest Aristotle abandons the polis…. He needs the

polis to keep friendship from stagnation. His is not an ethics of with-

drawal. The relationship between friendship and the city-state, is not

friendship removed from the polis, not even friendship over against

the polis, but friendship within the polis.

If Wadell is correct, noting that friendship is central to the moral life,

this reveals something about Jesus’s formation of friendships not only

with reputable people but also with sinners.

A number of philosophers, including Cicero, have suggested “that

the only measures that can be properly recommended respecting our

general conduct in the article of friendship is, in the first place, to be

careful that we form the connection with men of strict irreproachable

manners.”

While Aelred, at points in his work, seems to agree with

this suggestion, even noting, “Friendship can only exist among the

good.” He suggests further, “I am not cutting ‘good’ so finely as do

some who call no one ‘good’ unless he is lacking no whit in perfec-

tion.”

For Aelred, it seems that in reality friendship was possible

among those seeking to be good, not just those who had already at-

tained it.

Oliver O’Donovan says that Aelred was able to embrace

Wadell, Friendship and the Moral Life, 49.

Wadell, Friendship and the Moral Life, 49. He writes, “The overall structure of

Aristotle’s ethics and its constitutive elements of telos, eudaimonia, and the virtues,

remains, but exactly what these mean, how they are related, and how they function,

shift in light of this focus on friendship. That this is the case is suggested by Aristotle’s

otherwise enigmatic invitation at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘So let us begin

our discussion.’ Having reached the end, what are we to begin? Could it be that Aris-

totle asks us to reread the lectures from the perspective of friendship?”

Wadell, Friendship and the Moral Life, 49.

Cicero, On Friendship, trans. William Falconer, quoted in Cicero, The Outline of

Knowledge, ed. James A. Richards (New York: Richards, Inc., 1924), 117.

Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2008),

67.

Aelred, Spiritual Friendship, 92. He has one friendship with an irascible man, and

thus others ask how it is that he could be admitted into friendship when he does not

meet the requirements of friendship as one seeking virtue. Aelred responds by saying

that within the bounds of their friendship, the friend’s bad behavior does not surface,

166 Justin Bronson Barringer

this view, which the classical writers could not, because for him

friendship was not just the giving necessary in Cicero, but also

forgiving, capable of enduring some variable behavior on the friend’s

part…. Here, perhaps, Aelred found the answer to the problem of

friendship with the non-virtuous. It may be that we love our friend for

one virtue only; in light of the promise of growth and perfection that

is enough.

Jesus, it seems, had a way of bringing out the good in those for whom

the good was deeply hidden, and even when they had no good to offer,

Jesus gave them his own goodness as he preemptively extended the

offer of forgiveness, which was nothing less than the offer of friend-

ship.

It is in this way, then, that Jesus shows us that he is establishing a

new type of civic friendship. He does not seek only to include the no-

ble and good, or the mighty, but instead invites all people into friend-

ship with himself and each other. This is central to the flourishing hu-

manity Jesus has in mind, at least in part, because as Aelred notes,

while it often seems that people of low status have nothing to contrib-

ute to a friendship with someone who has material resources or power

or goodness, the former can offer “counsel in doubt, consolation in

adversity, and other benefits of like nature.” Furthermore, he argues

that if we only seek certain types of friends, then “how many most

worthy of all love shall we exclude,” and noting that ultimately “it is

not so much the benefit obtained through a friend that delights as the

friend’s love in itself.”

The community Jesus has established allows

for people to delight in the love first of God then of each other rather

than only seeking out friendships that appear to be advantageous, even

advantageous in attaining virtue. Aelred thus argues that “We are cer-

tain that friendship does not proceed from the advantages but rather

the advantages from it.”

Jesus seems to recognize this when he offers

friendship to humanity, and thus creates a new community of friends

not focused on the polis but instead on the basileia and ecclesia.

This new civic community is made up of friendships including peo-

ple of all types, from all places and times.

The new civic life Jesus

and that because of their friendship, Aelred can say that this friend “Preserves the law

of friendship toward me in such a way that I can restrain an outburst at any time by a

mere nod, even if it is already breaking forth into speech, so that he never reveals in

public what is displeasing.” Yet even with this friend Aelred says, “We give in to each

other so that sometimes he yields to me, but I generally yield to him.”

Oliver O’Donovan, Entering into Rest: Ethics as Theology 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerd-

mans, 2017), 143.

Aelred, Spiritual Friendship, 72.

E.g., Revelation 7:9.

Jesus is Not Just My Homeboy 167

makes possible by opening up friendship even to “sinners” is thus not

bounded by time and space any more than it is bounded by our own

ability to be virtuous, but rather it will exist into the new creation, and

is in fact the witness to the truth of this new creation. The new creation,

it seems, centers on a community of friends. The new city, the heav-

enly Jerusalem, is one in which Jesus’s friendship with each of us em-

powers us to be friends with one another fully. In the meantime, this

community of friends exists, in part, in the church. And, as Brian Ed-

gar argues, “The principle is that Christian community is created

through the offer of friendship…. Of primary importance is the fact

that the gospel was communicated through friendship and subse-

quently demonstrated the friendship life of the community.”

Thus,

friendship is central to the whole of the Christian life, and evangelism

is primarily an invitation into friendship, which continues to be the

way that Jesus grows and maintains his political community. Without

friendship there is no such thing as Christianity, as Stanley Hauerwas

and Charles Pinches argue when they write, “As Christians of all ages

have maintained, the Christian is Christian in the church; she cannot

know what being a Christian entails apart from the community of

friends who together form one another into selves who reflect the im-

age of their God.”

Working in the other direction then, we see that

God is a community of friends who has given that image to humanity,

and thus the image of God is most visible not in the individual but in

the community of friends that is the church.

As I have noted, this community is timeless and bears witness to

the rest of creation what civic life should be like. Jesus’s community,

in many ways not dissimilar from Aristotle’s vision, is one in which

friendships are primary, but these friendships do not end with death.

Gilbert Meilaender, as one among those who sees friendship in com-

petition with the sort of universal love that supposedly is the hallmark

of Christian faith, argues that for Augustine, though friendships are

important, ultimately “They are a sign and a call by which God draws

us toward a love more universal in scope. Philia is transcended by

caritas…. That picture of friendship is transformed by universal love

is, of course, a picture of heaven.”

It seems to me, however, that rather it is the case that philia is not

transcended by caritas (or agape) in heaven, but instead heaven refers

to how we are all are friends with God and given the capacity to form

Brian Edgar, God Is Friendship: A Theology of Spirituality, Community, and Soci-

ety (Wilmore, KY: Seedbed, 2013), 143–144.

Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches, Christians among the Virtues: Theological

Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre

Dame Press, 1997), 81.

Gilbert C. Meilaender, Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics (Notre Dame, IN:

University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 17–18.

168 Justin Bronson Barringer

particular friendships with all other friends of God. It is not the uni-

versalizing of the particular in a way that erases particularity in favor

of disinterested love, but instead, it is increasing the capacity for the

universal to find meaning in each particular relationship. God is not

friends with us in some disinterested, non-preferential way, but has

actually chosen us as particular friends, just as God chose Israel as

God’s particular people, and just as God chose Moses and Abraham

as friends, and just as Jesus chose twelve as friends and three as his

closest friends. Thus it is that Jesus’s new civic life is a community of

friends now and forever more, and these friends can be invited into

friendship with reckless abandon because of the strength found in the

eternal friendship of each person of the Trinity with each other, a love

that cannot be broken. As we have been joined up into this friendship,

we too can be assured in extending the invitation to others, even to our

enemies. John Panteleimon Manoussakis argues:

[Friendship is] ‘historically and logically’ prior to politics… and often

acts as a force of subversion to the established political order. Its pre-

political nature makes friendship more suitable for, or more under-

standable within, a Christian context, since the church, and the bonds

of communion amongst its members, ought to stand in a similar idio-

syncratic position vis-à-vis the political order—‘for our citizenship is

in heaven’ (Philippians 3:20).

This is the essence of Jesus’s political community, as the basileia tou

Theou (kingdom of God) can turn enemies into friends and sinners

into saints, thus providing an opportunity for all people to flourish.

JESUS AND THE TRINITY: FRIENDS AS OTHER SELVES (ETERNAL

EXISTENCE)

The fact that friendship is often described as finding another self

raises some interesting philosophical questions regarding how one’s

self can be also another’s self. Cicero, for instance, wrote: “A true

friend is no other in effect than a second self…. I had almost said, one

soul in two bodies.”

For him, “like attracts like” and “moral good-

ness attracts.”

In other words, “Cicero, in brief, says that love can be

conceived as a search for ourselves and that at the same time, it can be

John Panteleimon Manoussakis, “Friendship in Late Antiquity: The Case of Greg-

ory Nazianzen and Basil the Great,” in Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship,

ed. Suzanne Stern-Gillet and Gary M. Gurtler (Albany: State University of New York

Press, 2014), 175.

Cicero, On Friendship, 60–61.

Robin Weiss, “Cicero’s Stoic Friend as Resolution to the Paradoxes of Platonic

Love: The Amictia alongside the Symposium,” in Ancient and Medieval Concepts of

Friendship, eds. Suzanne Stern-Gillet and Gary M. Gurtler (Albany: State University

of New York Press, 2014), 143.

Jesus is Not Just My Homeboy 169

conceived as a search for the good.”

This seems to be the reason that

people were attracted to Jesus even though he had nothing in his ap-

pearance that was attractive.

People were attracted to what they saw

as the best versions of themselves in him and to a goodness beyond

what they could attain on their own.

Along with Cicero, “Aristotle

characterizes complete or perfect friendship as a relationship in which

two persons feel affection for each other due to their goodness.”

Thus, another self is the other in whom one sees similar virtue and

who recognizes the same about them.

A Christian conception of friendship, as seen for instance in the

friendship between Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, shows us that a

friend is not only another self, but actually also a separate other apart

from ourselves. Manoussakis says that when Gregory and Basil had to

part ways after their time studying together in Athens, “Gregory also

left behind him a narcissistic conception of friendship, more Greek

than Christian.”

In other words, he argues, Gregory did not now cling

to Basil as simply another self, but his understanding of friendship

grew as he saw that his friend was also “other than oneself. The

friend’s otherness allows him to appear with his own distinct charac-

teristics, which may contradict or even challenge the assumptions that

we sought to impose upon him.”

Cicero says of his best friend

Scipio, “In short, and to express at once the whole spirit and essence

of friendship, our inclinations, our sentiments, and our studies were in

perfect accord.”

This is what Gregory wanted from Basil, but he

learned that Christian friendship was different and could only be held

together by recognition of sameness and difference of another in the

Trinity.

Jesus prays in John 17 that his people will be one just as he and the

Father are one. If it is the case, as I have suggested, that Jesus is friends

with the Father and the Spirit, then it seems that Jesus shares mutual

affection with Father and Spirt, at least in part, based on their shared

goodness. Likewise, Trinitarian theology teaches us that Jesus is of the

same substance (homoousios) as the Father, but is also a distinct per-

son. God is in perfect accord as God is One and at the same time God

is Three. This, it seems, might give Christians at least some basis for

understanding friends as other selves who are yet at the same time dif-

ferent from ourselves, although we can only do so by analogy since

Trinitarian relationships are unmediated while human relationships

are always mediated. I am not suggesting a perfect correlation between

Weiss, “Cicero’s Stoic Friend,” 135.

Isaiah 53:2.

Romans 3:23–24.

Ward, Contemplating Friendship, 3.

Manoussakis, “Friendship in Late Antiquity,” 181.

Cicero, On Friendship, 15.

170 Justin Bronson Barringer

human friendship and friendship in the Trinity; rather, I am simply

suggesting that the Trinitarian friendship in which Jesus is involved

and invites us into, gives us some way to begin seeing others of God’s

people as both one with ourselves, as Jesus prays, and as those

uniquely distinct from ourselves. Ultimately, it seems that this is pos-

sible because God makes it possible when Jesus invites us into the

Trinitarian friendship through his own self-giving, which I think

moves us away from settling for agape as we embrace philia. Manous-

sakis puts it this way:

The Trinitarian model, which affirms consubstantiality of the divine

Persons while respecting and preserving at the same time their distinct

personal characteristics, and which thereby shows the ability of Chris-

tian thought to uphold sameness and otherness, challenges most deci-

sively the classical ontology of friendship, for which the starting point

is oikeiotes (as in Plato’s Lysis), and which seeks its perfection in nar-

cissistic homoiosis (the friend as another self, alter ego, mirror image,

double). As above, the Christian redefinition of the friend as a gift

points to the Trinitarian model of reciprocal donation, where to-be is

tantamount with to-be-given.

Thus, when we enter into friendship with the Triune God through the

invitation of Jesus, we too must become conduits of God’s self-giving.

It is in this act of our friendship that God brings us into the fullness of

who we are supposed to be. Proper self-love then is in self-giving for

the sake of expanding the reach of friendship to those not yet in its

communion.

Aristotle and Cicero both insisted that friendship is a requisite part

of the good life, in part, because in friendship we become virtuous and

have someone with whom to share our virtue. While it is the case that

God has no need to grow in virtue, for humanity entering into friend-

ship with God provides the ultimate grounds for our growth in virtue

and our ultimate enjoyment of it. Weiss argues,

Both Socrates’ and Aristophanes’ positions are misguided insofar as

they rest upon the assumption that love and desire are born of a kind

of lack that the object of attachment is supposed to fill, while love is

actually born of an internal abundance of the very thing we seek out-

side ourselves in another – virtue.

As it pertains to Jesus, surely his love is not motivated by lack, but

rather by abundance, a desire not to find something but to share him-

self, his Trinitarian friendship, with others. However, humans lack the

completion noted here by Socrates and Aristophanes and thus seek out

Manoussakis, “Friendship in Late Antiquity,” 176.

Weiss, “Cicero’s Stoic Friend,” 162.

Jesus is Not Just My Homeboy 171

fulfillment beyond themselves. We do not have within ourselves an

abundance of virtue and thus our love is completely the gracious gift

of God, as is our virtue. When we seek out both love and virtue, the

only place to find them are in friendship with Jesus. Manoussakis

writes:

If Aristotle, by his cryptic remark that the friend is another self, meant

to say, not that in our friend we find an image of our own self, but

rather that we find our true self by means of, and through, friendship

with others, then his remark holds true for the two Cappadocian

friends [Basil and Gregory]. As a result of their friendship, each

emerges transformed at the end. However, it is not so much that they

have changed by becoming someone else, different from the person

they were at the beginning of their friendship; rather, they have

changed by staying the same, by becoming who they always were.

It is the case that in our friendship with Jesus we become who we truly

are, or at least who we have truly been created to be. In him we have

found another self not because of our own virtue, but because of his,

and we have been given a means of seeing ourselves being brought up

into union with God. This points us back to the start of this essay in

some ways because it is through Jesus’s willingness to so closely iden-

tify with us as friends that he became our sin when he gave himself

fully for our sake thus exchanging our sin for his righteousness.

The

theosis we experience has always been evident in the Trinitarian

friendship inasmuch as the persons of the Trinity are both same and

different, and we are invited into this friendship with the God who is

wholly other than ourselves because this God has decided, by no in-

fluence from us, to extend that friendship to humanity and we are thus

being eternally made like God, though never being the same as this

Three-in-One who is always wholly (and Holy) other.

JESUS AND THE INVITATION TO FRIENDSHIP: NO LONGER SERV-

ANTS (ASCENSION AND ESCHATOLOGY)

I have already discussed Jesus’s invitation into friendship, but I

have yet to point to the place in Scripture where Jesus himself articu-

lates this. It is actually as a part of the Trinitarian discourse in John’s

Gospel that was discussed above that Jesus tells his disciples that he

does not call them servants but friends.

Jesus not only made this dec-

laration verbally but in giving up his life, which he says one does for

one’s friends.

As I have noted, for Aristotle, this invitation into, and

declaration of, friendship would not be possible because friendship

Manoussakis, “Friendship in Late Antiquity,” 190.

2 Corinthians 5:21.

John 15:15.

John 15:13.

172 Justin Bronson Barringer

cannot exist among those who are unequal. Furthermore, Ward notes

a problem with Aristotle’s view because only those who are equal can

be friends, yet friends wish the best for each other so they want the

other friend to succeed even when that makes the other friend move to

a superior rank. Thus, Aristotle’s “perfect friendship destroys itself.”

However no such requirement exists in the Christian stream, and we

are informed differently about what it means even to succeed (i.e., first

shall be last, and poor become rich), Christian friendships have a great

deal more flexibility, and thus I argue, a great deal more durability.

In fact they can and should be eternal, because whatever the station

one attains in life, all the faithful will participate in the same beatific

vision and friendship with Christ. Thus, Jesus’s invitation into friend-

ship reshapes friendship itself. Jesus makes not only friendship among

unequals possible, he makes it possible for enemies to become friends.

Now even a tax collector and Zealot can call each other friend.

It is right that we should be called servants of the King, as Jesus

has ascended to the throne in Heaven. Jesus is, after all, the uniquely

virtuous One who should be, and is, King. We should, therefore, ac-

cording to most of classical thought, not be allowed to be his friends.

Yet in Christianity, the monarchy, Jesus’s kingship, creates brother-

hood through Jesus’s kenosis, which while not creating equality in-

vites humanity to take on Jesus’s own righteousness thus allowing for

perfect friendship. That friendship with the King makes us only able

to truly be good citizens of his Kingdom because each regime has its

own idea of virtue, and as Aristotle says, “A good citizen of one re-

gime would not be a good citizen of another.”

Thus, the Christian’s

commitment as a citizen to that regime means she or he will not be a

good citizen of others. However, it is this peculiarity, that makes the

Kingdom of God appealing to the powerless and a threat to the pow-

erful, because the King Jesus invites the lowly into friendship even by

becoming lowly himself.

Jesus’s declaration of his disciples as his friends is an invitation to

all of humanity to join in the friendship of the Triune God, which is a

fulfillment of his promise to offer life abundant.

Abundant life is

friendship with God because friendship has unbounded benefits,

whereas other goods in life, like wealth, are limited. Cicero’s words

Ward, Contemplating Friendship, 13.

Matthew 20:16 and 2 Corinthians 8:9.

Ward, Contemplating Friendship, 118. Here she discusses the virtuous king and

how that king could not be friends with those whom he rules when she writes, “King-

ship, therefore, combines complete justice with distributive justice [if people who are

perfect in virtue are made kings]…. However, kingship of this kind introduces a rad-

ical inequality between ruler and ruled that would make perfect friendship between

them impossible.”

Aristotle, Politics, 1276b33–34, in Ward, Contemplating Friendship, 118.

John 10:10.

Jesus is Not Just My Homeboy 173

that follow here are particularly true of our friendship with Jesus:

“Friendship is adapted by its nature to an infinite number of different

ends, accommodates itself to all circumstances and situations of hu-

man life, and can at no season prove either unsuitable or inconven-

ient—in a word, not even fire and water are capable of being converted

to a greater variety of beneficial purposes.”

And thus, without know-

ing it, Cicero offered a picture of both prelapsarian friendship with

God and the friendship we will find fully in the Parousia, when he

wrote:

There is a truth and simplicity in genuine friendship, an unconstrained

and spontaneous emotion, altogether incompatible with every kind

and degree of artifice and simulation. I am persuaded, therefore, that

it derives its origin not from the indigence of human nature, but from

a distinct principle implanted in the breast of man; from a certain in-

stinctive tendency, which draws congenial minds into union; and not

from a cool calculation of the advantages with which it is pregnant.

It is into this life that we are invited upon Jesus’s declaration of his

disciples as friends.

CONCLUSION: JESUS AND TWO FRIENDS – PETER AND JUDAS (RES-

URRECTION)

Regardless of the appropriateness of making Jesus a homeboy

stamped onto apparel, it is undoubtedly right to call Jesus friend and

to understand his friendship as our only means to life eternal and abun-

dant. Two other biblical stories, I think, encompass what has so far

been said about Jesus as friend. The first is in Jesus’s interaction with

Judas upon Judas’s betrayal, and the second is in Jesus’s reconciliation

with Peter.

When Judas comes to sell Jesus out, Jesus calls him friend.

I am

not inclined to believe that this was in any way sarcastic, but in fact

pointed back to Jesus’s earlier declaration of the disciples as friends.

Here, Jesus reveals himself to be one who is completely noble, willing

to maintain a friendship even with one who was in the act of betraying

him, selling him to those who would kill him. In this moment Jesus

shows how he embodies so much of the idea of megalopsychia even

as he takes on the appearance of mikropsychos in giving himself up,

stupidly it seems, not only for the friends who remained faithful to him

but even for the one who betrayed him. Weiss writes, “The impulse to

sacrifice oneself without reserve is one that cannot be given way to

until the virtue of the would-be friend is proven…. In this way, the

Cicero, On Friendship, 20.

Cicero, On Friendship, 25.

Matthew 26:50.

174 Justin Bronson Barringer

bonds of friendship are slowly but surely strengthened, but the whole

process must be brought to a halt once one party reveals her untrust-

worthiness, and her unworthiness for friendship.”

Yet, thankfully for

all of us, Jesus did not see it this way. Here Jesus showed himself truly

to be the friend of sinners, because it was no ordinary sin in which

Judas participated, but it was in the sin of selling God himself, being

an accomplice to the Messiah’s execution. Even then Jesus calls Judas

friend.

Unfortunately, in his remorse, Judas did not think himself able to

be reconciled to Jesus; whereas Peter, who likewise betrayed Jesus by

denying him, found reconciliation when his friendship with Jesus was

restored. After Jesus’s resurrection he pulls Peter aside and asks if Pe-

ter loves him.

Manoussakis says that in Jesus’s reconciliation with

Peter, Jesus uses agape but Peter’s response with philia was more em-

phatic because it would not make sense that Peter would say “I like

you” in response to Jesus asking if Peter loved him. Further, he says

Jesus was asking if Peter loved (agape) him even as an enemy was to

be loved (see Luke 6:31–36), but Peter responds by saying he loves

him only as he could love a friend (philia). In this way Manoussakis

makes the remarkable and, I believe, true claim that “[t]he Gospel

seems to imply a different hierarchy, where friendship (philia) ranks

even higher than agape.”

In this story, Peter simply claimed what Jesus had already declared;

Jesus was his friend. In response, Jesus essentially tells Peter to go and

extend that invitation into friendship to the whole world so that each

person could find themselves brought into the fullness of who they

were created to be as they become friends with the Triune God. For

Christians, then, it is not enough to have a philosophy of friendship,

but rather we have a message of a particular friendship, and the other

particular friendships that come as a result of this primary friendship.

This is why Manoussakis is correct to write:

There is, we suspect, a good reason for this change of emphasis be-

tween, on one hand, the approach of the philosopher and, on the other,

that of the Christian thinker. The incarnation of the eternal Logos in

Jesus of Nazareth has focused attention on the historical (see, for ex-

ample, with what detail the circumstances of Jesus’s birth are recorded

in the Gospel of Luke) as well as on the particular. The result was a

slow but irrevocable reversal of the old priority of theory’s universal-

ity over history’s particularity.

Weiss, “Cicero’s Stoic Friend,” 156.

John 21:15–19.

Manoussakis, “Friendship in Late Antiquity,” 174.

Manoussakis, “Friendship in Late Antiquity,” 177.

Jesus is Not Just My Homeboy 175

Christians can respond to the trials of this world and live lives of virtue

not because we have a theory of friendship, but instead because we

have a friend. As the old hymn says, “What a friend we have in Jesus,

all our sins and griefs to bear.”

Justin Bronson Barringer is a pastor, consultant, writer, and editor. He also

happens to be PhD candidate in religious ethics at Southern Methodist Uni-

versity. Justin is a recipient of the Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fel-

lowship, CM Cares Religious Scholars Award, the John Wesley Fellowship,

the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, and the Cary Maguire Fellowship, as well

as the Jenzabar Foundation Student Leadership Award. Perhaps best of all,

Justin is the husband of Rachel and father of Israel and Zoe. Justin’s books

include A Faith Not Worth Fighting For (Cascade, 2012) and The Business

of War (Cascade, 2020) along with the forthcoming volume Practicing the

Kingdom (Cascade, 2021) and the co-written tome God and Country (Music)

(Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2022).

Joseph Scriven, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” in The Baptist Hymnal (Nash-

ville: Convention Press, 1991), hymn 182.