I hope you enjoyed Dan’s talk on Sunday about friendship as an outworking of radically simple discipleship. I thought it was brilliant!
In light of this I wanted to just jump back to something Dan briefly mentioned and pause a little longer on it.
Genesis 1:27 says: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them‘ (emphasis mine).
Notice how, in this early creation account, God creates man (‘him’) but he does it by creating community (‘male and female’). This passage has got swallowed up in the current debate around gender and sexuality but today I want to steer clear of that and focus on something just as important! I believe this passage teaches us that to be truly human means to live in community! Not necessarily marriage (Jesus was never married yet was fully human), but we do need others. Let me reverse this; to live a sub-human life is to drift into isolation, separation and a lack of deep relational connections with others. These are very strong comments but I can state them boldly because here in this passage, God’s good and perfect creation of humanity was communal (‘them’). Completion looked like … ‘them’ not ‘me’.
Rowan Williams, in his little book on what it means to be human, invites the reader to do a simple philosophical exercise. He asks: ‘How do we know what the back of our heads look like?’ I know we live in an age of cameras and mirrors, but try to forget that for a moment. How can we truly know what the back of our heads look like? The answer is, you guessed it, through community. When a friend says: “did you ever know you had a bony back of your head?” In that moment, something of who we are is known that couldn’t be known outside of a communal setting. In that moment we see the importance of learning how to live in a community.
Let me say it again, to be fully human we need one another. So when Dan was talking about the importance of friendship (or the activity of community), he could also have been talking about what it means to be truly alive!
Adam Bradley
