“Atheists sometimes ridicule Christians as having an ‘invisible friend’ [in Jesus]… We think friendship is juvenile, but it is not. Friendship may well be the hardest thing of all… it makes us different from the person we would be if we were alone, and, I daresay, it makes Jesus different as well… As Jesus risks with outstretched hand toward a world of potential friends, does not every hand that is returned – in some way – transform Jesus as well?”
—Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus, p. 2, 8, 19
