Considering the helpless

 This week's Bible study is on Psalm 41:1-4:

Blessed is one who considers the helpless;
The Lord will save him on a day of trouble.
The Lord will protect him and keep him alive,
And he will be called blessed upon the earth;
And do not turn him over to the desire of his enemies.
The Lord will sustain him upon his sickbed;
In his illness, You restore him to health.

As for me, I said, “Lord, be gracious to me;
Heal my soul, for I have sinned against You.”

 

 These verses are interesting because they put another spin on charity. They describe benefits for taking care of those people who can't help themselves. But they don't mean taking care of them in the sense of just ritualistically giving money, but more like being mindful of them and their situation.

But at the same time as the Psalmist is pointing out the benefits of taking the helpless into consideration, he's also praying for himself. Maybe he's realizing that he too isn't really taking the helpless into consideration, and that maybe that might be something that is standing between him and God.

But do we ourselves take the helpless into consideration? Nowadays, we're surrounded by self-proclaimed victims who are all too eager to let us know of their disadvantages, but are they really helpless? We don't really have people in our society who are without agency in a meaningful sense, where they are considered non-persons, don't have access to careers of any kind, don't have access to medical care, etc.

Even the poor in the West are not really poor in the sense that we would think of someone as poor. Nobody is walking around naked because they've worn out or hocked their last set of clothes. We don't have people walking ten miles to get access to clean water, or people starving to death because there is simply no food. Nobody is selling their kids into prostitution or leaving babies to die in the woods because there is nothing to feed them.

So it's kind of hard, on the one hand, to identify where verses like these would apply in our lives, but also kind of easy, on the other hand, to dismiss them and make excuses. And yet the Psalm says clearly that those who consider the helpless are blessed! It says that God will save them on a day of trouble, protect them, and keep them alive. So we have a strong incentive to figure this out!

Even though there are not really any classically poor people in the West, there are plenty in other places in the world. And even though there are not any people who depend on you putting honest to goodness physical money into their hands in order to be able to clothe and feed themselves at all, there are plenty who have less than you, and who experience pain and hardship all the same for lack of money.

But do we really consider those people when we make our life decisions? Who among us honestly says to himself "You know, I could get that sports cable package, but maybe I'd rather help a village get a well put in, or help my neighbor get his car fixed so he doesn't have to take out another predatory payday loan again."

We don't really think like that in our day to day lives. It's usually more like "I gave the minimum donation to a few charities around Christmastime, so I'm a good person, and since the rest is mine I want ..." And part of that, honestly, is I think many of us don't really know any helpless people, or even see them over the course of a typical day or year. We consider ourselves, and we consider our peers, and probably enviously consider the rich people we're exposed to via the media, but we don't really consider the helpless.

We may not even want to consider them. They make us sad. And if we let ourselves feel their suffering, we might feel the need to do something rash that would keep us from getting that cable package, or that nicer car, or the expensive fast fashion all the cool folks are wearing. We're not so rich that we can just throw a handful of coins out the window of our carriage as it thunders through Peasantville in a big cloud of dust and not worry about how many we have left in the treasure room.

 

It's a bit like the question the Pharisee asked Jesus about who his neighbor was. We want to know the answer in an abstract sense, but we also kinda don't in a real sense. We're happily numb to the concept of giving to the poor, defending the weak, and helping the helpless, but we don't want to continue the thought to the specifics of who, when and how much. The cross is quaint when viewed from a distance, but nobody's in any hurry to climb up there and see what it really entails!

And yet here is King David, who was plenty rich, stopping in his tracks to set things right. He asks God to be gracious and to heal his soul. He knows that God considers helpless people like him. He makes the connection.

When we help someone who needs help, in a way we're saying to God "I get it. I understand a small piece of what you have done for me." We're being Christlike. We're living out grace. So what if the homeless guy is going to spend it on booze? Who cares if the money you gave your friend's son to pay his rent is going to buy a new game instead? Have we never squandered what God has given us?

If we help those less fortunate, people will consider us the luckiest people in the world. Or at least that's what King David is saying. If you're not experiencing that blessing he describes, maybe you should join him in asking God to heal your soul and be gracious to you.