Friendship was a relationship very specially regarded in the ancient world, more so than it is with us.

Philosophers of all kinds thought it a fit subject for reflection, and spoke of it mainly in superlatives. "A friend," said Cicero , "is nothing other than a second self."

You find many expressions of a similar kind in ancient literature. Friendship was looked on as one of life's more humanising relations. It was also a school of virtue, that is, it refined you and helped to turn your heart to the pursuit of the good. Friendship in the ideal was not simply excellent companionship, but competition in excellence itself.

Of all the loves, friendship is the least natural, in the sense of being the least biological, organic, or necessary. It also has the least commerce with our nerves.

There's nothing in it to turn you flushed or pale. We cannot live without eros - the race would decline. But we could easily live and propagate without friendship. The species has no need of it.

Erotic love may, however, lead to and be deepened by friendship. If and when lovers also become friends, they discover that friendship can be a great love. Few things in fact so enrich erotic love as the discovery that the beloved can truly and deeply enter into friendship with the friends one previously had.

Unlike eros , friendship is non-possessive. My friend is not mine in a way that excludes him or her from becoming yours. Friendship is also un-inquisitive. A friend, unlike a lover, doesn't want to know "all about you." Knowledge will come, in the course of time, but as incidental to other things. In the meantime, one gets on with doing what one has to do - one gets on with life.

Friendship is quite free of affection's need to be needed. Friends do what they can, or as is required, but meeting "needs" is not what friendship is about. Whatever needs to be done is done, and the friendship goes on its way again - though generosity in times of need makes friendship grow into a deeply appreciative love.

Friends do not, like lovers, look into each other's eyes. They look outwards at the world together. And they talk. Talk, in fact, is the essential coin of friendship. Talk about everything.

As the famous poem has it: " They told me, Heracleitus/they told me you were dead/They brought me bitter news to hear/and bitter tears to shed/ I wept as I remembered/how often you and I/had tired the sun with talking/and sent him down the sky .

Jesus called his disciples friends - " I no longer call you servants ..." This, in fact, takes us back to the ancient ideal of oneness. Discipleship is meant to develop and blossom into friendship, the disciple becoming the Lord's "second self". In fact, the highest designation of the saint in antiquity was also not servant, but "friend of God."

Jesus thus points to a special identification between himself and his disciples, because they are friends. In Matthew 25 there is an equally strong identification between Jesus and " the least of the brethren. " " Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me ," he said.

Not "I will take it as if you were doing it to me." The identification is much stronger and much more mysterious than that. "You were doing it to me ." And here, in calling the disciples friends, he is emphasising an identification of a similar intensity. He is not only Lord but Friend. The disciple is his second self .

As I noted earlier, we possess each of our friends more, not less, as the number of those with whom we share him or her increases. This is not possible with either affection or eros . Affection will agonise through the pains of jealousy; eros will insist that when you are mine, it means just that; you belong only to me.

This is the opposite of friendship with Jesus. We possess more of him the more we increase the number of his friends. Friendship in this way, as Lewis writes, bears a glorious resemblance to heaven.

In heaven, the very numbers of the blessed contribute to the enjoyment which each of them has of God. Every soul, experiencing God in his or her unique way, communicates that to all the rest. That is why in the famous vision of Isaiah, the group of angels, the seraphim, are crying out " Holy, Holy, Holy " not simply in ecstasy but in ecstasy to one another .

The more we have and share Jesus or God among ourselves, the more of Jesus or God we all have.