Above the world our calling boast:
Once gain the mountain-top, and thou art free:
Till then, who rest, presume; who turn to look, are lost.”
THE FALSITY OF THE FAMILIAR FRIEND.
Psalm xli. 9.
The psalmist’s enemies were speaking evil of him: when should he die, and his name perish? All that hated him were whispering together against him, and devising hurt. But this he could bear, on the part of declared foes. What he could not bear was that his own familiar friend, in whom he trusted, and who ate of his bread, should have lifted up his heel against him.
Hengstenberg remarks that in Judas the expression, “Which did eat of my bread,” receives its full, its frightful verification, in the fact of his participating in the Last Supper—to say nothing of habitually sharing in previous and everyday meals.
Even a comparatively slight wound may be severe when dealt by a friend. Dr. Colani thinks that never could the Son of man have felt so acutely the pain caused by opposition and non-recognition as when He received the message from John the Baptist, inquiring into the credentials of His Divine mission. That the rulers of the people, that one of the twelve, that those of His own kin, should doubt or dispute His mission, was hard enough to bear, but perhaps easy to foresee. But when he who had baptized Him, who had, so to speak, revealed Him to Himself,—when His “spiritual father” took his stand among the doubters, “Jesus must have felt a heartrending surprise, a veritable consternation:” for the Baptist was not a reed shaken with the wind, and yet, if the Divine hand rested on that support, what but a reed was it, to pierce, even while it gave way?
The Et tu, Brute! of dying Cæsar is a large utterance, hardly more deep in reproachful pathos than wide of application. The bitterness of its import, varying in intensity, has sufficed to choke bad men and good and indifferent,—as a pang more sharp than all. What stung Jugurtha to the heart was the treachery of his confidential agent, Bomilcar, who intrigued to betray him to the Romans. What Cicero professes to have felt most keenly, during the Clodian troubles, was the perfidious conduct to him of that Serranus to whom, when consul, he had been so kind; nor was it the least bitter drop in the cup he had to drain at the last, that the leader of the band who took his life was one whose life Cicero had once saved, as counsel for the defence. Antony in the tragedy is naturally made to brood most resentfully on the being betrayed by one on whose bosom he had “slept secure of injured faith.” He can forgive a foe, but not a friend: