Among the most precious gifts that you have received at Providence College are the friends that you have made.  You have hung out with them, learned with them, lived with them, laughed with them, and cried with them.  They are sitting beside you now and they were sitting with you at the commencement formal.  Some of themBbut not all of themBwill be tied to you for the rest of your lives.  You may even marry one of them (I just met a married alumni couple who met here).

Friendship is such an important part of living a good life that Aristotle devotes more time to it in the Nicomachean Ethics than any other topic.  He says Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.  Aristotle considers the treatise on friendship to be important to ethics because our friends shape our character intimately.   Likewise Jesus, in his farewell discourse to his disciples, spends time teaching them about friendship because he knows it is an important part of a good life.  Aristotle and Jesus would agree on least three characteristics of friendship that are highlighted in today's gospel:

• Friendship involves moral choice.  It is a relationship that we must freely choose to enter into with another person.  It can be initiated by one person, but it must be reciprocated.  The choices we make about our friends are among the most important moral decisions that we make in our lives because our friends help shape who we are.  We must choose wisely.
• Friendship involves intimacy.  You have to share yourself with another in order to be friends.  Thoughts, feelings, and experiences have to be shared.  That kind of vulnerability is sometimes scary, but it leads to the fulfillment of the deepest human desire: to be beloved for who we really are.  This desire is beautifully expressed in a late fragment of Raymond Carver's poetry:  And did you get what you wanted from this life even so?  I did.  And what did you want? To be beloved.  To call myself beloved on this earth.   
• Friendship involves sacrificial love.  Wishing and doing well for the other even to the point of giving up all you have is an essential mark of friendship love.  The proof of friendship lies in the sacrifices that one person makes for the good of another. 

Jesus and Aristotle would disagree, however, about the most important teaching on friendship contained in today's gospel: that we can be in a friendship relationship with God.  Aristotle said that gods and humans could not be friends because there is too much inequality between them.  But Jesus equalizes us with God by inviting us to share in his own relationship with God.  He raises us up so that we can be friends of God through him.  With respect to us, Jesus does each of the three things necessary for a friendship with God through him:

• He chooses to be friends with us.  It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you.  In baptism God chose you in Jesus to be friends with him.  That is an extraordinary claim:  God chooses to be friends with the likes of you and me.
• He shares himself intimately with us.  As the father has loved me, so I have loved you. Remain in my love. Jesus gives us the gift of his very own love with the Father in the SpiritBthis is the inner heart of God's Trinitarian life.  I have told you all this so that my joy may be in you, and your joy complete.  Jesus's own joy, the greatest gift of the Easter season and what we have in our hearts today, is Jesus's abiding gift to us.  I have told you everything that I have heard from my father.  There are no secrets with Christ (despite what is said in DaVinci Code).  Jesus reveals completely who God is and holds nothing back. 
• Jesus has laid down his life for us.  As we heard in today's second reading:  In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.  On the Cross Jesus has shown the depth of his love for us by sacrificing everything. 

As you now depart from Providence College, you have some important choices to make about your friends that will intimately shape the rest of your life.  I cannot give you specific advice about which of your Providence College friends to maintain an abiding relationship with, but I have given you some criteria to help you choose. When it comes to Christ, however, I can give you specific advice.  He is the one friend that you must chose to remain in relationship with if you want to lead a happy life. I hope that one of the things that we have taught you here is how to choose your friends wisely.  It is my hope and my prayer for you that you have made many friends for life here at Providence College, and that one of those is Christ.  Chose wisely, and stay fast-knit to Christ as your most trusted friend. It is your most important choice as you go forth from here.

May 20th, 2006