Each of us knows from experience that friendship is one of the most beautiful experiences life can give us. With our friends, we share moments of joy and fun, but we also know that we can find comfort and support in them during difficult times.
Friendship is such an important and universal feeling that, since 2011, the International Day of Friendship has been celebrated every year on July 30, with the intention of highlighting and valuing this “noble and precious feeling in the lives of people throughout the world.”
The Church also celebrates friendship
It may seem strange to us, but Jesus the man, although he was the Son of God, also needed friends. Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, the saints whose liturgical memorial we celebrate on July 29, the day before the International Day of Friendship, are presented by the Gospels as Jesus’ “special” friends, three siblings with whom the Lord shared moments of deep communion in life. Just as we do today with our friends, Jesus shared festive moments with them (Jn 12:2), but he also wept with them in their grief (Jn 11:35) and sought comfort and support in the warmth of their home in Bethany before facing the darkest and most difficult days of his life: his passion and death (Jn 12).
Martha, Mary, and Lazarus thus help us enter the heart of Jesus, and make him feel so much like us, so close to our desire not to be alone and to our need to love and be loved.
But this look “into” the heart of Jesus should also prompt us to take an honest look at ourselves: often, in fact, in the way we experience friendship, we risk being superficial or, worse still, opportunistic and selfish. Jesus teaches us that friendship is love and, as such, can only ever be the total gift of oneself for the good of the other: “No one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15:13). And this is what Jesus did.
