I like to think I know my friends, and what to expect from them: not much from Jack, who lives a mile away, but extreme affection from Steve, who lives in Australia.
But occasionally, they surprise me.
Last week, a friend of mine found an old piece of broken pottery in a rabbit hole and, because I work in a museum, sent me a picture of it.
I didn’t say the surprises were always exciting.
They wondered if it might be a bit of Roman tile and, after applying my expert forensic eye, I was able to report with some degree of confidence that I had no idea.
However, I did look at it carefully and I saw faint lines scratched into the wet clay before it was fired. I saw pale scars from its time buried underground. Where it was broken, I saw it was buff and dark grey; and I saw, hidden, embedded in the clay, a fragment of stone.
And as I examined and got to know this thing, it made me wonder how well I know my friends, even after decades of looking.
Not so well, perhaps. I probably don’t know what’s caused the scratches on their surface; I don’t know all the rabbit holes they’ve been down; I don’t know what’s hidden inside them.
When Christians gather to remember Jesus, we share bread and wine and we say, ‘Although we are many, we are one body, because we all share one bread’.
St Paul wrote that and I’m struck by his choice of words.
We’re not one body because we agree with each other, or because we look the same; we’re not one body because we know each other’s birthdays.
We are one body because we all share one bread.
And I reckon that’s what makes for friendship: breaking bread, not knowing everything. We become one, gradually, by virtue of what we share – a walk, a letter, forty years of taking the mickey or forty minutes with a broken tile. We share – time, experience, dinner – and that’s how we build each other up, feed each other, love each other. We literally become companions – ‘com’, meaning ‘with’; ‘panis’, meaning bread.
I still have no idea if that old bit of pottery was Roman. But I’m glad to have shared the question. I’m glad when anything is shared. I’m glad there is friendship in a broken tile just as surely as there is in broken bread.
St Paul’s words are in 1 Corinthians 10, v.17.