Psalm Chapter 41

About this episode

This episode explores Psalm 41, focusing on themes of betrayal by a close friend and the importance of considering the poor.

Psalm 41: The Friend Who Lifted His Heel This psalm closes the first book of the Psalter, and it does so with a wound. "Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me." There is a particular kind of pain that only intimacy makes possible — the stranger cannot betray you, for he was never close enough to try. David knows what it is to be ill, to lie on the bed of languishing while enemies count the days until his name perishes, while visitors arrive with false comfort and leave with fresh gossip. But none of this cuts like the familiar friend. Jesus Himself reached for this verse on the night He was betrayed, applying it to Judas at the table: "He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me." And yet the psalm does not begin with the betrayal. It begins with a beatitude: "Blessed is he that considereth the poor." The man who attends to the weak will himself be attended to by God in his own weakness. There is a divine reciprocity at work — not as transaction, but as the natural economy of mercy. Even here, with the taste of treachery still sharp, the psalm ends where all the psalms of David end: with…

Topics covered

• betrayal
• friendship
• trust
• mercy
• spirituality

Keywords

• Psalm 41
• betrayal
• friendship
• David
• Jesus
• mercy
• trust

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