Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 0-247 Sunday 17 Dec 2000

Reading: PSALM 41 – CARING LOVE

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

The love of God cannot be communicated unless it is embodied in people who love. We are called to bear his love to others: `Lord, help me to have regard for the weak’ (v 1).

For a Psalm born out of the writer’s own physical and mental distress, its opening words are remarkable.

First, he affirms that the basis for God’s blessing on a life is ‘regard for the weak’.(See James 1:22 2:19) The phrase indicates a thoughtful, wise investigation into the reasons and conditions of poverty and weakness.(See Luke 10:3335) Christians in the UK will therefore want to follow closely the government’s major inquiry into persistent poverty and its effects within an affluent society. To ‘have regard for the weak’ is to reflect the mind of God. He is ‘a father to the fatherless’.(See Ps 68:5)

In Hebrew thought, fundamental to the good life, is the perception that everyone is a slave who has been liberated by God’s action. This vision is the great leveller. It sweeps away all the bogus, sinful distinctions which people use to separate themselves from each other. It demolishes snobbery as an absurdity in the light of God’s boundless generosity.(See Deut 24:1722) ‘Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you’.(Rom 15:7)

He, the Lord, made himself the servant who takes the burden of others on himself. The only model he left us is the servant model. Hence the saying that ‘the healing of the world is in its nameless saints’. And God will bless the one who has ‘regard for the weak’ (v 1). When he is ill God is there beside him ‘on his sickbed he nurses him’ (v 3 REB). The commentator G A F Knight remarks that, ‘God, like a kindly nurse, even changes the soiled sheets. Often enough God is called the Great Physician; here he is the visiting nurse’.

Not only does Jesus ‘have regard for the weak’, in a mysterious but real way we encounter him in the weak.

– Dennis Lennon

Copyright Scripture Union, 2000