No wonder that, with such inspiration, a new type of friendship appeared among the followers of Jesus. We are so familiar with the life which Christianity has produced, where the fruits of the Spirit have reached their finest and best development, that it is well-nigh impossible for us to conceive of the condition of human society as it was before Christ came. Of course there was love in the world before that day. Parents loved their children. There was natural affection, which sometimes even in heathen countries was very strong and tender. Friendships existed between individuals. History has enshrined the story of some of these. There always were beautiful things in humanity,--fragments of the divine image remaining among the ruins of the fall.
But the mutual love of Christians which began to show itself on the day of Pentecost surpassed anything that had ever been known in even the most refined and gentle society. It was indeed divine love in new-born men. No mere natural human affection could ever produce such fellowship as we see in the pentecostal church. It was a little of heaven's life let down upon earth. Those who so loved one another were new men; they had been born again--born from above. Jesus came to establish the kingdom of heaven upon the earth. In other words, he came to make heaven in the hearts of his believing ones. That is what the new friendship is. A creed does not make one a Christian; commandments, though spoken amid the thunders of Sinai, will never produce love in a life. The new ideal of love which Jesus came to introduce among men was the love of God shed abroad in human hearts. "As I have loved you, that ye also love one another" was the new requirement.
Since, then, the new ideal of friendship is that which Jesus gave in his own life, it will be worth our while to make a study of this holy pattern, that we may know how to strive toward it for ourselves.
We may note the tenderness of the friendship of Jesus. It has been suggested by an English preacher that Christ exhibited the blended qualities of both sexes. "There was in him the womanly heart as well as the manly brain." Yet tenderness is not exclusively a womanly excellence; indeed, since tenderness can really coexist only with strength, it is in its highest manifestation quite as truly a manly as a womanly quality. Jesus was inimitably tender. Tenderness in him was never softness or weakness. It was more like true motherliness than almost any other human affection; it was infolding, protecting, nourishing love.
We find abundant illustrations of this quality in the story of the life of Jesus. The most kindly and affectionate men are sure sometime to reveal at least a shade of harshness, coldness, bitterness, or severity. But in Jesus there was never any failure of tenderness. We see it in his warm love for John, in his regard for little children, in his compassion for sinners who came to his feet, in his weeping over the city which had rejected him and was about to crucify him, in his thought for the poor, in his compassion for the sick.
Another quality of the friendship of Jesus was patience. In all his life he never once failed in this quality. We see it in his treatment of his disciples. They were slow learners. He had to teach the same lesson over and over again. They could not understand his character. But he wearied not in his teaching. They were unfaithful, too, in their friendship for him. In a time of alarm they all fled, while one of them denied him, and another betrayed him. But never once was there the slightest impatience shown by him. Having loved his own, he loved them unto the uttermost, through all dulness and all unfaithfulness. He suffered unjustly, but bore all wrong in silence. He never lost his temper. He never grew discouraged, though all his work seemed to be in vain. He never despaired of making beauty out of deformity in his disciples. He never lost hope of any soul. Had it not been for this quality of unwearying patience nothing would ever have come from his interest in human lives.