Anonymous Asks (406)

“To what extent are friendships transactional?”

If you peruse secular media and believe what you read, your answer is probably a quick and hearty yes. Perhaps you have come across the expression “toxic friendship”. The line of thinking currently in vogue is that your friends exist to benefit you. When they stop being satisfying and become more trouble than they are worth, it’s time to give your old pals the boot right out of your life. In the words of Marie Kondo, “The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past. Keep only those things that speak to your heart.” By “things” she means people.

Hmm. Let’s see what the Bible says about that.

Qualities of a Biblical Friendship

What makes a friendship scripturally good? The Bible does not exactly have a chapter on the subject. It’s more like the word “friend” is scattered throughout its pages here and there. Reading between the lines a little, we can derive some principles from the word of God that may be useful in setting reasonable expectations for our own friendships.

Job says godly friends ought to be kind. That element should not be absent from our closer relationships. David writes in the Psalms that good friendships are sympathetic. A friend’s loss is your loss too, and her gain is your joy. In another Psalm, he points to the element of trust. You don’t expect your friends to betray you. In Proverbs, Solomon adds love and consistency to our list of important qualities. “A friend loves at all times.” In another proverb, he points out that “Everyone is a friend to a man who gives gifts.” That’s not necessarily a good thing, but we can derive from it that real friendships are genuine, free of hidden motives. Again, good friends speak to one another truthfully, even when it hurts. “Faithful,” Solomon writes, “are the wounds of a friend.” A friend may tell you things you don’t want to hear, but in doing so, he’s showing his loyalty. Yet again, we find biblical friendships characterized by good advice. They are edifying. “Oil and perfume make the heart glad, and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel.”

The Opportunity Principle

That’s a lengthy list of good qualities. If you examine your own friendships, you might not find all of these qualities coming back to you from every relationship in which you invest, and you might not find them equally evident at every moment. We live in a fallen world, where sin affects our dispositions from one day to the next, and therefore has an impact on our relationships. As Christians, we need to take the frailty of human nature into account when we set our expectations of others.

Okay then, having defined friendship biblically, we may be better equipped to answer today’s question. But I’m thinking about the way the Lord Jesus neatly inverted the lawyer’s question “Who is my neighbor?” with his parable of the good Samaritan. His answer came down to this: My neighbor is anyone to whom I have the opportunity to show mercy.

In doing so, he reminded his listeners that neighborliness is not about what you get from a relationship, it’s about what you give. The biblical focus is not on our rights but on our responsibilities. I believe biblical friendship operates exactly the same way.

You Get What You Give?

So then, any list of the good qualities we might generate from scripture is not there for us to use as a checklist of things we ought to expect from our friends. God gave it to us to help us figure out how to BE a good friend to others. In fact, if we take seriously the Lord’s command to love our enemies (and I believe he was talking there not about our feelings about people but our actions toward them), then every relationship we have should be characterized by as much biblical friendship from our side as we have opportunity to lavish on others.

The world asks, “What am I getting out of this friendship?” For the Christian, that’s not a consideration. The question for us is “What can I put into this?” or, more pragmatically, “How can I most effectively show Christ to this person?”

I’m not suggesting for a moment that’s the easiest attitude to maintain when we are not getting much back from others and have been putting a whole lot into a relationship. Nevertheless, I believe it’s what we ought to be shooting for. The old line that “You get what you give” has plenty of exceptions in reality. Sometimes you don’t get back the loyalty, love and affection you dish out. You may give a great deal and find it goes unnoticed and unappreciated. That’s fine. Time, money and bandwidth are all limited resources. It’s not unreasonable even for Christians to spend them where they generate the greatest return. Nevertheless, I cannot see any biblical reason to withhold friendship wherever and whenever the opportunity exists to be kind, truthful, loyal, sympathetic or genuine.

So then, there’s nothing transactional about biblical friendship. The more we can get our heads around that truth, the better friends we will be to others in need of it.