Maundy Thursday 2012

Red House stands in an unremarkable residential road in Bexleyheath, close to the principal corridors that connect London to the south-east. When William Morris moved into it in 1860, one year after his marriage to Jane Burden, its site was less cluttered. He had chosen it because the new railway meant that it was accessible from London and because it enjoyed an isolated, rural location. It was surrounded by an orchard of apples and cherries and afforded views of the Cray valley. But Morris did not conceive of the house as a romantic retreat for two. In its bricks and tiles he realized his vision of a great medieval dwelling reborn. Red House was built for friendship. Its doorways are wide and its porches spacious. Its bedrooms may be modest but its common areas are most definitely not. The grand dining hall, the airy drawing room, the long gallery and the wooden central staircase dominate. Morris was enchanted by Arthurian legends and by the myths of the high Middle Ages, and for his house he had in mind the castle keep in which the order of knights feasted, or the common home in which the band of artisans plied their trades.

So he gathered his friends, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Swinburne, and for five years he played the feudal host. Games of hide-and-seek ranged around the corridors and mock battles were fought in the garden. The friends dined together and frolicked together, and they worked together too. It was out of their longing to fill Red House with beautiful stained glass and delicate embroidery that the company was formed that is still selling curtains and wallpaper to the home-owning public 150 years later.

Crucial to the house, crucial to the firm, crucial to the whole artistic movement of which it was the vanguard; crucial to Morris himself was friendship - the company of the like-minded with whom he consciously surrounded himself at every stage of his life.

Friendship is an overlooked theme, both of the life of Christ and of the celebration of this holy night. Rarely do we recall that around the table in the upper room there gathered a group that Christ declared to be a group of friends. Rarely do we preach about their friendship, rarely do we read about it, rarely do we think about it. Yet Christ never wrote a book or established an institution. He drew together that group. His ministry was exercised from among that group, and therefore friendship is surely a vocation that we are called to exercise, a vocation that we are called to proclaim and to live.

If I'm right, then it is a vocation that has been tightly squeezed. The Church has properly upheld the vocation of marriage and has properly upheld the vocation of celibacy, but, unhealthily obsessed with sexual practice, it has too often forgotten the primary vocation of friendship. And in the Facebook era this is desperately important. Today the architecture of friendship is disclosed not in Morris's bricks, terracotta, and brotherly horseplay, but in the idle click of a mouse at midnight. "Posner...has a host of friends, though only on the Internet, and none in the right name or even gender" as Alan Bennett shrewdly observes in The History Boys. So tonight, as we recall the last supper that Christ's friends shared, let us be recalled to the holy path of friendship.

Aelred, twelfth century Abbot of Rievaulx, asked whether a monk, called to be a brother to all in his monastery, could enjoy particular intimacy, and concluded that he could. Friendship's foundation is love, he writes, and it is sought 'not with a view to any worldly good, nor for any reason extrinsic to itself, but from the worthiness of its own nature, and the feeling of the human heart, so that it offers no advantage or reward other than itself.' Friendship is loving and it is disinterested. He goes on, writing 'My friend must be the guardian of our mutual love, or even of my very soul, so that he will preserve in faithful silence all its secrets, and whatever he sees in it that is flawed he will correct or endure it with all his strength.' Friends are stewards of one another's deepest and most sacred depths. And although in certain circumstances friendship cannot endure, still the love that underpins it must. 'If the person you love harms you, love him still. If he is such a person that you think your friendship with him should be withdrawn, still you should never withdraw your love for him...Never betray the secrets of your friendship with him, even if he betrays yours.'

Red House was sold when Burne-Jones failed Morris by refusing to live there and establish a permanent household of co-workers and friends. His plans dashed, Morris turned his back on the house that he had loved, and, bitterly disappointed, never went there again. The friends who sat at table with him failed Christ. Judas betrays him; Peter denies him; the inner circle fall asleep in the garden; they all abandon him. Only Christ is left, loving them with a self-forgetful love, comprehending the innermost secrets of their hearts, never neglecting them despite their neglect of him. Christ is the true friend, and his pattern of loving constancy is set before us tonight in Scripture and in Sacrament: we are called to be the friend he is to us.

'Even if he is chastised, even if he is hurt, even if he is handed over to be burned or is nailed to the cross, he who is a friend loves for all time' writes Aelred. In our faithfulness to God, in our fervour for the Gospel, and in our friendships with one another let us follow the Christ, our brother and our friend. Amen.