Thought for the Day – Spiritual Friendship: Barnabas and the Holy Trinity

Friendship, Pablo Picasso, 1908

A Thought for the Day given at St Giles-in-the-Fields on the Feast of St Barnabas the Apostle, Wednesday 11th June 2025 at 1pm based on the texts of Acts 11.19-30 and John 15.12-17.

Today the church celebrates the life of Barnabas the Apostle, who as we hear in Acts worked closely with St Paul, sharing the Good News of Christ and helping to nurture and support the early church. Barnabas accompanied his friend on several missionary journeys. Until their well-documented falling out that is - after Paul prevented Barnabas’s cousin John Mark from travelling with them. A reminder of how tricky friendships can sometimes be.
 
In today’s gospel reading we learn something very special about friendship. Speaking to the disciples at the Last Supper on the night before he died, Jesus says he will no longer call them servants of the Lord - but friends. We are friends of Jesus if we do what he has commanded us - to love one another as he has loved us.

Friendship is revelatory. It brings us closer to Jesus. It brings us into relationship with him, through the receiving and sharing of love, as Christ commanded.

In his book ‘Spiritual Friendship’, the twelfth century Cistercian monk Aelred of Rievaulx says “God is friendship”. He goes on to explain that true human friendship is sanctified by the presence of Christ. “Here we are,” Aelred writes, “you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, in our midst.” The very nature of God is the mutual self giving and receiving of love with one another.

The theologian John Zizioulas, who died in 2023, develops this idea. In his book “Being as Communion”, he offers a novel way of understanding God as Trinity. That God does not just have relationships but is relationship itself. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist only in communion. Their very nature dependent upon their relationship with one another.

All we who are made in the image of God are thus made likewise. Called to be in communion with one another.  Living - existing - not for ourselves but for the other. We were made to outwardly reflect the inner nature of God himself.

As the friendship between Barnabas and Paul reveal, great things can be achieved through friendships. But they can also be tricky. We can never perfectly reflect the divine life here on earth.

But, through Christ, friendship offers a means of coming close to it - and is therefore the path towards fulfilment of each of our own. When we call someone our friend - as Jesus does - we are revealing something about the nature of God.

So friends, let us continually pray that we might truly love one another as he loves us.

Image : Friendship by Pablo Picasso, 1908