'Friendship, then - for Christians who take their cues from the arc of the scriptural story - lives with pain. There's the daily pain of our efforts, as well as our failures, to love each others under the conditions of sin and weakness that we all experience, along with the resultant tensions, heartaches, and losses that such attempts can incur. And, additionally, there's the final pain of surrendering the beloved friend, and surrendering oneself, to death, whether metaphorical or or eventually, literal. Friendship, in Christian terms, is all about giving up oneself for the sake of love and embracing the cost of such radical loyalty. Friendship, in a word, is cruciform. If Jesus is the ultimate author and exemplar, then we can't fail to remember that his own practice of friendship ended with him strung up on an instrument of imperial torture, made helplessly vulnerable and wracked by grief. Friendship for him wasn't an escape route from self-sacrifice. It was the other way around: self-sacrifice was precisely the way he enacted a life of friendship.'
Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship, p.100.
