Wednesday, 3/31/2021
Holy Week
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 55; Jeremiah 17:5–10,14–17; Philippians 4:1–13; John 12:27–36
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1–3,11a,14c,18–19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68–79, BCP, p. 92)
There’s little worse in life than being betrayed by someone you thought was a friend. All the honest things you’ve told them about yourself, truths you’d only tell someone you trust implicitly, now they are ammunition in the hands of an enemy. There’s the question now about your own ability to gauge friendship: “What did I miss? What’s wrong with me? Can I trust myself to trust anyone?”
In Psalm 55, we find that King David has had this experience, although scholars are unsure of exactly which event this psalm describes. The betrayal of a friend has led to a conspiracy taking over the city of Jerusalem (Psalm 55:11–12). David’s first instinct is to pray. Therein lies his greatness. And his gift to us is that he writes his prayer down.
An even greater gift is the way David’s own experience turns out to provide us an advance view of our Savior’s experience. As often in David’s psalms, when he opens his heart to Yahweh about his troubles, he provides an anticipatory glimpse into the experience of Jesus Christ, the true Son of David who was to come a thousand years later. This Holy Week, I find myself noticing several features of Jesus’s life in David’s prayer about friendship betrayed.
Betrayal hurts (Psalm 55:13–14,21–23). Jesus Christ is not untouched by any grief we bear. He has known what it is to have a close companion offer “speech [that] is softer than butter, but war is in his heart. His words are smoother than oil, but they are drawn swords” (Psalm 55:22–23). Jesus had entrusted the disciples’ finances to someone he had treated as a “familiar friend,” and with whom he “took sweet counsel” … and worshiped together “in the house of God” (Psalm 14,15). When betrayal leaves us alone and abandoned, we can know we are not truly alone and abandoned. Jesus is right there with us, a “man of sorrows and acquainted with our griefs” (Isaiah 53:3).
Jesus could have prayed for escape, but didn’t (Psalm 55:7–9). David imagines himself escaping with “wings like a dove.” Running away to the desert where he doesn’t have to deal with people. Finding rest and shelter in a far-off place, protected from storm and tempest (Psalm 55:7). Similarly, for a brief moment in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus wonders if there might be another way to accomplish his task. He asks that the cup of death’s judgment might pass from him. But he submits: “Not my will, but Thine be done.” Happily, over the course of his life, Jesus’s deeper prayer to be delivered “out of death” has prepared him for his cross and vindication (Hebrews 5:7). Praise be!
Jesus could have called down judgment, but didn’t (Psalm 55:10,16, 25–26a.) Understandably, David calls upon God: “Swallow them up, O Lord,” and predicts his enemies will be brought “down to the pit of destruction” (Psalm 55:10,25). What makes Jesus our Savior (and David’s) is that while his ancestor David prays for God to ruin the betrayer and the enemies who have come against him, Jesus responds and prays differently. He expresses nothing but sorrow for his betrayer: “It would have been better for that man not to have been born” (Mark 14:21). And he asks the Father to forgive those who scourge him, mock him, and nail him to the cross: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Thanks be, especially since, if we are honest with ourselves, we know we belong as much with the betrayer as with the betrayed.
Jesus took his pain to his Father (Psalm 55:18). “In the evening, in the morning, and at noonday, I will complain and lament, and he will hear my voice.”David is saying pretty much: “All day long, I bring my just cause and my grief to you, Father.” The New Testament is as candid about Jesus’s own emotions before God. Our authors aren’t embarrassed about the passion that leads Jesus to whip the moneychangers, the vituperation he pours out on phony faith, his grief for the daughters of Jerusalem who will go through the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the tears he sheds at the grief of Lazarus’s mourners, the “loud cries and tears” he lifts up over the course of his life, or his anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane (John 2:17; Matthew 23:13–39; Luke 23:28; John 11:35; Hebrews 5:7; Mark 14:32–50). The New Testament writers attribute to Jesus a blunt and raw honesty before God. He knows his Father cares about what is on his heart. That’s good news for us: our blunt and raw honesty won’t push our Heavenly Father away from us either.
Jesus trusted his Father for deliverance (Psalm 55:17,24,26b). David can acknowledge all of the gritty things in Psalm 55—his hurt over a friend’s betrayal, his wish that he could just fly away from it all, his desire for vengeance, and his pain —because, at bottom, he knows his Father’s love for him. In spite of the betrayal and ugliness which follows for Jesus, he, too, knows his Father’s love for him (and for us). He is confident of his Father’s determination to see deliverance all the way through, for him (and for us). “But I will trust in you.”
Collect for Wednesday in Holy Week. Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Image: From "Betrayal" by vidalia_11 is licensed under CC BY 2.0