Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. For one who has become exhausted with contemporary cultural expressions of Christianity, this is a breath of fresh air…and a challenge. I imagine myself in the scene…perhaps one of the disciples…
The crowds have grown, encroaching, suffocating…everyone wants a piece of Him…everyone wants to see and hear….they come poor, dirty, hurting…needy. I might even have begun to resent them. Jesus leads us up a mountainside, away from the din, to teach. We wait for Him to speak, more of what we’ve wanted to hear…words of revolution, talk of new kingdoms, of renewal and change, and here we are in the midst of it…on the inside…it’s thrilling. Yet in a moment, as He begins, the energy is drained from our self-centric view of it all…”blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Blessed are the mourners, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, the insulted…
What…?
For so long I couldn’t even read the Beatitudes, and I imagine there were disciples who couldn’t hear it then either. I wonder why we rarely hear this in church today? We want clear directions…we want to know the rules…so we can be sure we remain on the “inside”. However, these rules are unattainable…I challenge anyone to tell me the 5 simple steps to any of these. Unattainable, yet this is the journey toward spiritual maturity.
Christ begins His teachable moment by saying, in effect, “good job to those of you who are poor in spirit…for that’s the insiders track…that’s the kingdom…that is the reward.” I don’t get it. It’s in giving up the inside track that we gain it… giving up preference, power, recognition… giving up our needs for these things…giving up the ways we meet these needs: ambition at work, leadership in our church, deference from our spouse. It’s giving up the desire for the inside track, even giving up the notion that there is an inside track. It is giving up. We could never get it. Poor in spirit is not something to be attained or earned…it involves loss. Loss of self.
Even in writing these disjointed thoughts, I realize I still miss it. Like the disciples, I’m left scratching my head…wondering what happened to that spiritual worldview that was all about me. I only have the vague sense this simple, brief passage is central to the Christian life…death of the self, loss of the self, poverty of spirit. Lord, take me there…ask of me what you will. Do I really mean it?
Richard Rohr again:
“…And the reward is present tense! I always say this one liner is the beginning of Jesus’ inaugural address: “Congratulations to the poor in spirit.” It is a key to everything Jesus will teach and live. Your opening line often contains your main point or leads to your main point. I wonder if most Christians have seen a simple, humble spirit as absolutely central to Jesus’ teaching?
To be “poor in spirit” means to live without a need for your own rightness, or any sense of moral superiority to anyone else. It’s a free inner emptiness, with no outer need for advancing your own reputation or any opinionated one-upmanship. If you’re actually poor in spirit it won’t be long before you’re poor in other ways too. You won’t waste the rest of your life trying to get rich because you’ll know better on the inside. Inner poverty precedes and lays the foundation for a simple, non-consuming lifestyle. ”
Adapted from Jesus’ Plan for the New World, p.130
and again…
Blessed are those who mourn: they shall be comforted
~ Matthew 5:5“In this third Beatitude, Jesus praises the weeping ones, those who can enter into solidarity with the pain of the world and not first of all try to separate themselves from it. On our initiated men’s t-shirts, we have a quote from the American Indians, “A young man who cannot cry is a savage. An old man who cannot laugh is a fool.”
If you learn how to enter into solidarity with human suffering when you are young, you will create a humanity that makes it possible for you to smile when you are old. What a paradox. If the young are not led into this human “community of pain” in the first half of life, they become hardened, egocentric, and entitled very early in their lives. Yet baby boomer parenting has thought we needed to—or could—shield our children from all pain and human suffering. I don’t think Jesus would agree with that at all.
“The weeping mode” allows one to carry the dark side of things, the “tears of things” as the Latin poet said, to bear the pain of the world without needing to define perpetrators or victims, but instead recognizing the tragic reality that both sides are usually caught up in. I must hold these contradictions, I need to suffer them, I let them transform me. The weeping mode of life is quite different than the succeeding mode, the controlling mode, the fixing mode, the climbing mode, or even the explaining mode. Perhaps it is in the Beatitudes more than anywhere else that we see how utterly counter-cultural Jesus really is.”
Adapted from Jesus’ Plan for the New World, p.133
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