Ps. 55.12 (the final breach)

For / it is not an enemy / that taunts me;
I could bear that;
The one who hates me / has not vaunted himself / against me,
I could hide / from him.

The psalm has been in a downward spiral, leading to this final act of betrayal. At the beginning of the spiral we see the psalmist, in a dream, out in the wilderness, away from the “wind storm’; then, in the midst of the city, he sees himself surrounded by a type of personified evil; this is followed by the individual evil men emerging (“the enemy” and “the one who hates me”). Now, as the psalmist has traced the arrow, it begins its final descent into the most vulnerable and intimate source: his friendship. As the arrow makes its approach, however, we see how deeply it has sunk. All of the traditional images of the ‘enemy’ in almost every other psalm are brushed aside. Unlike our many other psalmist, these he “could bear” and “hide from”. It is a rather profound act of relativizing the power of “the enemy” in order to highlight the depth of his friend’s betrayal. And, it may be that we see here why the transition is made from the dream sequence involving the dove to the demand for judgment. When the psalmist says of the “one who hates me” that “I could hide from him”, he is recalling the image of the dove that “hides from the storm” in the wilderness. Hiding from ‘these men’ is not a dream, but a real possibility. He does not need to ‘dream’ about fleeing from them. However, the betrayal of his friend has so profoundly shaken him that any dream of escape has become that—only a dream. Once the realm of friendship is infected, the possibility of escape is gone. And, as we saw, the only remedy is judgment. This means that the sphere of friendship (of covenantal loyalty), is of such a qualitatively different category than other relationships that, once that barrier is breached, the psalmist is effectively flooded. Prior to that act of rebellion, escape was possible. It is the betrayal of a friend that creates in the psalmist the dual realties of dream and judgment. This would be a rather profoundly important point when it comes to Judas, as his betrayal marks the final breach—that which places Jesus directly into this crux as the last wall is torn down and the flood begins to pour in.