Matthew 5:1-5
What does it mean to be blessed? Every year at Thanksgiving we talk about “counting our blessings,” which usually means counting up all the good things in our lives—not a bad thing to do, of course, but is Jesus talking here about a list of good things to count?—mourning, being persecuted, reviled, despised? Not exactly the kind of stuff you’d be thankful for around the dinner table.
Another popular idea that “blessed” means “happy” in the sense of feeling content and satisfied. Indeed, the word “blessed” has been translated “happy” in some versions of the Beatitudes. Robert Schuller once wrote a book about the Beatitudes called the “Be Happy Attitudes” – cute title. But the word Jesus uses here for blessed, while it can imply contentedness and happiness, isn’t the normal Greek word for “happy” as in a life of puppies and rainbows. It goes much deeper than that.
And then there’s the way that they use blessing in the South—you know, as a polite way of speaking ill of someone else. Like when someone says, “That boy is dumber than a bag of hammers, bless his heart.” Not exactly the best way to be blessed!
So what does Jesus mean here when he says “blessed?” Well, it’s important that we look at the way that word is used throughout the Bible. One of the first places that “blessing” emerges as a concept is in the story of Abraham in Genesis 12, where God calls Abraham and promises to make a great nation from him, and then God says, “I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and those who curse you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Gen. 12:3).
Notice the formula here—I will bless you so that you will be a blessing. God’s blessing, or God’s favor, is given to Abraham for the purpose of being passed on to others. In other words, the blessing, favor, and grace of God always comes to us on its way to someone else. Time and again, this is how God’s blessing works in Scripture—it is not for us alone, not a product we receive, but rather a vocation—we don’t just count our blessings, we share them. We can’t be truly happy ourselves until we make the world around us happy. We are not just blessed, we are to be a blessing.
This is really the only way the Beatitudes make sense. Why else would the poor in spirit, the mournful, and the meek be blessed or happy? These are the exact opposites of what we most often think of as conditions for happiness or counting our blessings, and yet Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount with these marks of blessing as indicative of the kind of people through whom the kingdom of heaven is going to become a reality on earth. The Beatitudes show us the marks of an authentic disciple of Jesus, those who embody his character, and what those disciples are, they are for the world.
The Beatitudes are set up in such a way that they build on one another, and they seem to do so in sets of three. We might think of them as thesis, antithesis, synthesis—the first one of the three makes a proposition, the second provides an antidote to the first, and the third one combines the first two. This isn’t just a random list of blessings, but a means of building the character and vocation of a disciple.
So let’s look at this first set of three Beatitudes—blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, and blessed are the meek.
Jesus begins with a provocative thesis—“Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Now, before we go here we’ve got to make sure we separate Matthew’s version of the Sermon from Luke’s. Luke’s Gospel is aimed at a Gentile audience, and Luke is primarily concerned about liberating the poor and oppressed. Luke thus has Jesus saying, “Blessed are you who are poor.” In that sense, Luke is tapping into a long biblical tradition of God’s preference for the poor, the marginalized, the widow, and the orphan. We thus have to take Luke’s version in Luke’s context.
But here in Matthew, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Remember that Matthew’s Gospel is a Jewish one and is aimed at telling us that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of David and son of Abraham, and that he is the one who fulfills the law by embodying it (that was last week’s sermon).
So when Jesus talks about the poor in spirit, our clue to what that means is found within the context of his own life and character. If we want to know what being poor in spirit looks like, we turn to Jesus as the first example.
Matthew gives us a clue about poverty of spirit early on in chapter 3 when Jesus comes to be baptized by John. Now, why would the Son of God need baptizing for repentance from sin? When it comes to holiness, Jesus has it all. And yet, down into the water he goes and the voice of God speaks: “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” And what the Father says here is a reference back to the book of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, 42:1, where God is speaking about someone called the Servant. The Servant was a messianic figure, the one who would do for Israel what she could not do for herself, and suffer on her behalf. God, via Matthew, thus identifies Jesus as that Servant–Here is my Servant, whom I uphold, Here is my Son, the beloved, in whom I am well-pleased. Jesus’ baptism identifies him as a Servant of God as well as the Son of God—he will be obedient to God all the way to the end. As Paul puts in Philippians 2, Jesus:
emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave (servant),
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross
Jesus is the Servant who embodies obedience to God
Then, immediately after his baptism, Jesus obeys the leading of the Holy Spirit and goes out into the wilderness where he denies himself food for 40 days. He denies himself so that he can be filled by God in preparation for his ministry. Satan tempts him to use his power to make bread, to use his power to impress the people, to use his power to rule the world like Caesar, and yet Jesus denies himself all these things in favor of his mission—in favor of obedience to God. He endures severe poverty of body and spirit and denies himself what the world offers via Satan, in order to gain a different kind of life and different kind of messiahship.
I think that “poor in spirit” combines these three things: servanthood, obedience, and self-denial. The one who is poor in spirit recognizes that he or she has nothing to offer God on his or her own, that their life has no purpose apart from God. They obey God not out of obligation, but out of a desire to gain something better—the kingdom of God. The poor in spirit are those who voluntarily empty themselves so that they can be filled by God.
The prospect of being poor in spirit and denying ourselves is perhaps the toughest hurdle to overcome in order to become a disciple. As I said last week, the Jesus way is a foreign way to us. We are used to being more dependent upon ourselves than on God. Echoing Satan in the desert, the 19th century philosopher Nietzsche claimed that “God is dead,” and then crafted a philosophy of life around that assumption which essentially went like this: “Assert yourself. Care for nothing except yourself. The only vice is weakness and the only virtue is strength. Be strong, be a superman. The world is yours if you can get it.” Nietzsche eventually went insane, but his philosophy is still widely practiced by a world that’s just as crazy.
Jesus calls his disciples to the opposite worldview. “If anyone would come after me,” he says, “let him deny himself and take up his cross and then come follow me” (Matt. 16:24). Deny yourself. Care for everything except yourself. Strength is found in weakness. Be weak, be a servant, be totally dependent upon God. Those who lose their lives in this way, for Jesus’ sake, will find them. Even death has no hold on the poor in spirit, for they have already chosen the way of the cross and the promise of resurrection.
It’s in this weakness, this poverty of spirit, however, that followers of Jesus find ultimate strength and freedom. As E. Stanley Jones once wrote, “Everything belongs to the man who wants nothing.” When we cultivate a lifestyle that does not depend on things, on recognition, on money, on status, then we are free to live life without the stress and anxiety that comes from the constant pursuit of more. Jesus says that the poor in spirit are blessed for theirs in the kingdom of heaven—of course it is. They receive the kingdom because nothing else is in their way! They embrace the life of the kingdom when it comes because they have already been living it—living in full dependence on the king. They are blessed because their poverty of spirit enables them bless others.
That’s where the second beatitude comes in—“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Disciples who are poor in spirit, who have turned their attention away from themselves, now begin to see the world as it is—a world in pain, a world where the selfish desire of sin dehumanizes people, a world full of violence, a world that has given up hope of redemption. Those who mourn are blessed because they are able to enter into the world’s pain and grief and are not afraid of it. This is the kind of mourning that Jesus himself poured out when he wept over Jerusalem and wept at the tomb of Lazarus—a deep groaning out of love for God’s world.
Some people say that religion is an escape from the world. Indeed, even a lot of
Christian theology is about escaping the pain of this world for heaven, but the message of the kingdom is that God is doing something about the world’s pain and calls us to be a part of his mission. Disciples don’t look to escape the world, they roll up their sleeves to get involved in it the muck and mire of it. We can only do that, however, if we have first become poor in spirit, until we have first taken off our blinders that cause us to ignore the pain around us every day.
So what we have here in these first two beatitudes is a paradox. In the first, we renounce the world and ourselves in spirit, and in the second we turn right around and say, “The world is worth saving, and I will go to any length to redeem it with God’s help as an agent of God’s kingdom.” The surrendered heart becomes the sensitive heart.
Those who mourn in this way, says Jesus, shall be “comforted.” Now when we think of comfort we usually think of snuggled warmth, a hug, a kind touch—all of which is true and helpful. But the origin of the word “comfort” is actually a combination of two words in Latin: con – meaning “with” and forte – meaning “strength.” Notice what this does to the passage: Blessed are those who mourn for they will be blessed with strength—strength to go into the world and enter its pain. The blessing is a vocation. We work for the kingdom in the present while we await its completion in the future.
Blessed are the poor in spirit (thesis), blessed are those who mourn (antithesis). Now we come to the third beatitude which synthesizes the first two: “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”
Now what do you think of when you hear the word “meek?” A mouse? A wimpy person? As Kin Hubbard puts it, “It's going to be fun to watch and see how long the meek can keep the earth once they inherit it.” We don’t think of the meek being able to be much more than a doormat for the strong and aggressive.
Not in the beatitudes, however. Here, meekness is a combination of two elements: the power and decisiveness of self-denial in the poor in spirit, and the passion for the pain of the world in those who mourn. Those who both want nothing from the world and, at the same time, are willing to share everything with it are the meek. The spirit of self-denial and the spirit of service come together to make a new being—the most formidable person on earth—the terrible meek. They are terrible because they want nothing, hence they can’t be tempted or bought, and they are terrible because they are willing to go to any lengths, even unto death, on behalf of others.
There’s no better scene of terrible meekness than Jesus before Pontius Pilate. There he stands, silent and strong. He could not be bullied or bought because he wanted nothing from Pilate or the religious leaders—nothing except to give his life for the pain of the world—the pain of the very people who were crucifying him. It’s hard to imagine a greater strength than this—one who stands in the face of death without fear and yet with a love that is tender enough to forgive his tormenters. Jesus is silent, but he doesn’t go quietly. Pilate seems afraid of him, the tough Roman guard at the foot of the cross and the condemned convict on the other side of him both recognized his strength. This is the kind of strength that even death cannot defeat.
Jesus never raised a sword, and yet he defeated the Roman empire. He never said a word his captors, and yet his silence spoke volumes. He took on the worst pain a human could imagine, and yet he did so willingly. You simply cannot defeat a person like that.
Tom Wright puts it this way: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth: in other words, when God wants to sort out the world, to put it to rights once and for all, he doesn’t send in the tanks, as people often think he should. He sends in the meek; and by the time the high and mighty realise what’s happening, the meek, because they are thinking about people other than themselves, have built hospitals, founded leper colonies, looked after the orphans and widows, and, not least, founded schools, colleges and universities, to supply the world with wise leaders.”
No one gives the earth to those who have this kind of terrible meekness, they inherit it because they have staked a claim on it. The future of the world will be in the hands of those who love and serve the world. Terrible meekness is the way of the disciple.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are those who mourn.
Blessed are the meek.
Such as these will characterize the life of the kingdom.
In these three beatitudes, Jesus strips away the things that prevent us from being true disciples: self-sufficiency, inoculation to the pain of the world, and the pursuit of power through intimidation and violence. These are the ways of Nietzsche’s madness.
He replaces them with a spirit of self-denial, a deep compassion and love for a world in pain, and a terrible meekness that will ultimately win the earth. These are the ways of the kingdom.
All of us have been called by Jesus to be disciples. We have all been blessed so that we will be a blessing. How will you live that blessing this week?
What will you deny yourself in order to gain a further glimpse of the kingdom? What do you need to give up in order to realize the blessing?
Where is the world in pain around you? Who do you know right now that’s in pain and in need of your compassion? How will you enter into their pain and bring healing, with strength?
And where in your life do you need to take a principled stand? Where would a terrible meekness, a strength from conviction, begin to change things? How might your non-anxious, self-differentiated presence make a difference in your office, your home, your school?
No, the beatitudes aren’t theoretical…they are the way of the kingdom. They are part of the rule of life.
May we receive the blessing, so we can be one.
