“Friend” is a vulnerable relationship status in the culture of 2025, but is a sacred one in the pages of Scripture. When we were kids, we gave out friendship bracelets and necklaces freely, eager to find that lucky one who could ascend to the status of “Best Friend Forever.” In that same era of life, while friendship could be broken over the most trivial of things, most of the time, we made up just as easily. Between a cultural shift that centers on pseudo-therapy ideals and becoming adults, this soft-hearted approach to friendship has given way to a much more self-centered and cynical form.
I call this form “cut-off culture.” Let me define “cut-off culture” first. “Cut-off culture” is the common idea that if a friend is “too much drama,” or fails you in any way, they are “no longer serving you,” and so you should cut them off. It celebrates “low-maintenance friendships” that don’t demand too much investment from you and yet are always there when you need to make a withdrawal. This extends to ending friendships when conflicts arise, rather than working through them with healthy confrontation. In this culture, friendship is a vulnerable relationship status as we place people on indefinite probation, often without telling them. Each of these features works together to make friendship convenient and transactional rather than mutually edifying.
As I read Scripture, it becomes clear to me that the fragility of friendship in our culture does not gel well with the sanctity of friendship to God. In Christian teaching and culture we often highlight the sanctity of marriage and parent-child relationships and their functioning as metaphors for God’s relationship with us. What we don’t talk about as frequently, is Jesus’s use of friendship as a metaphor for our relationship with the Father. In Luke 11, Jesus taught His disciples how to pray, introducing what we now know as the “Our Father.” Immediately afterward, Jesus said:
“Suppose one of you has a friend and goes to him at midnight and says to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I don’t have anything to offer him.’ Then he will answer from inside and say, ‘Don’t bother me! The door is already locked, and my children and I have gone to bed. I can’t get up to give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he won’t get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his friend’s shameless boldness, he will get up and give him as much as he needs.
So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.”
—Luke 11:5-9
Jesus then went on to the well-known metaphor of a generous father who would not give a stone when his son asked for bread. But this friendship parable comes first! And it paints a radically different picture of friendship than that of today’s “cut-off culture.” There are three things this parable teaches us about God and friendship:
Friendship is the spirit in which we approach God.
Friendship is the metaphor Jesus chose to describe our requests to the Lord. In the Our Father, Jesus highlighted multiple requests, such as: “Your kingdom come,” “give us today our daily bread,” “do not bring us into temptation,” and “deliver us from the one evil” (Matt. 6:9-13). In Luke 11, He then promised that God will answer us if we ask, seek, and knock, just as a friend would. The friend in the parable doesn’t just hope his friend will help him, he goes boldly in the middle of the night and asks for help directly, unburdened by any concern about whether it was appropriate to ask, nor any fear that the friend would say no. Jesus described the approach as “shameless” and “audacious.” Think about it: would you boldly show up at any friend’s house in the middle of the night asking for help if you weren’t convinced they’d help you? No! When we’re in a bind, we know the friends who would help us out in an instant, even if they were a bit frustrated by it being last minute or inconvenient. Jesus encouraged us to approach God with the same audacity and certainty that He will meet our needs!
This is how we begin to see that friendship is a sacred relational category to God. This parable does not function if friendship is fragile and unreliable. If friendship is culturally flimsy and mostly an unspoken probation that can be violated by inconvenience and is dependent upon being low-maintenance, it could not point to our relationship with God as Jesus said it does. Thus, we cannot settle for this as only a metaphor for our relationship with God; it is telling us what friendship ought to look like.
Friends can, will, and should inconvenience you sometimes.
In the parable, there are three friends: the friend visiting in the middle of the night, the friend asking for bread in the middle of the night, and the friend being asked for bread. All three friends are ultimately inconvenienced by friendship. The visiting friend arrives at midnight to a host without food for them after their long journey. Inconvenient. The hosting friend welcomes the visiting friend, perhaps despite not expecting him, which would make sense of why he is unprepared with bread. Or perhaps, he did expect him but spent the day preparing everything else to host and ran out of bread, a crucial supply. Inconvenient. He then involves a third friend, who is asleep with his children and “can’t get up to give you anything.” Seriously inconvenient. Yet, Jesus said that because of the audacity of the hosting friend, he would get up and “give him as much as he needs.” Every friend experienced inconvenience, yet each exercised patience, love, and sacrifice for one another.
This is who we are called to be to one another: women who show up to help when a friend is in need, even when it is not convenient. And notice, this doesn’t mean we won’t grumble or be frustrated by inconveniences, but we are to show up anyway. Sometimes this will be sacrificial giving, and other times it will be joyful generosity, but both are central to the friendship God calls us to.
Real friendship is generous and hospitable.
Another feature of this parable that strikes me is the centrality of both generosity and hospitality in Jesus’s construction of friendship. Not because the nature of the friends’ requests is domestic: somewhere to sleep and something to eat, but because the requests are, what we might consider, intrusive and reliant upon generosity. These are not arms-length low-maintenance friendships. These are up-close and personal friendships, that demand time, space, involvement, support, and tangible assistance. This intrusiveness is visible in the friend arriving at midnight, the friend knocking on the door at midnight, and the friend’s initial refusal to get up from his bed to help, saying: “Don’t bother me!” I don’t blame him for that initial response; it’s entirely reasonable. Yet he helped anyway. Each friend welcomed the other into his life to a point of vulnerability and dependence. Here we don’t see transaction; we see interdependence. One can’t thrive without the generosity of the other!
This is the friendship we’re called to. Hospitality is the act of welcoming people into our lives, allowing them to need us, and allowing ourselves to need them. Generosity is the act of giving, without selfishness, whatever our friends need. This is not an argument for lacking boundaries, but for generosity and hospitality that considers the needs of our friends as just as important as our own. Generosity and hospitality are impossible to offer figuratively. They demand literal and tangible offerings to those we call friends. Engaging in hospitality and generosity often means that others ask things of us that require us to give of ourselves in ways that illuminate our sinful hearts and brokenness. It may cause us frustration, annoyance, and even bring conflict sometimes, but this is the path of real friendship.
There is much more that we could draw out of this short parable, but here we begin to see that friendship, in its true form, cannot be quick to cut-off those we call friends if they have needs that inconvenience us. Instead, Jesus invites us into a demanding and rewarding relationship that can and should point to the relationship we have with the Father. And what an honor it is to build relationships that reflect our most cherished friendship.
ABOUT ABENA ANSAH-WRIGHT
Abena Ansah-Wright is a follower of The Way who is in love with God and the ways in which His Word speaks to every aspect of life. A first-generation Black British woman of Ghanian and Trinidadian parentage, the Lord led her to move to the United States in 2016 to complete her doctorate in History. She now lives in Pennsylvania with her husband while working in higher education and writing. At her home church Abena is a worship leader and community group leader, and she shares all God is teaching her at her website abena.prof. You can find her on instagram and threads @abenabansahwright.
