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“Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” According to Matthew, this is the very first thing Jesus said to his disciples in the way of teaching. And guess what? Though this Beatitude may seem straight forward, it is wrought with ambiguity. Seriously, just try sorting out what being “poor in Spirit” means. In the Gospel of Luke, Luke has Jesus just saying, “Blessed are the poor.” Though we might not readily understand or accept that there’s a blessing in being poor, Luke is pretty straightforward in that it is the poor, poor people, who are blessed. But Matthew has Jesus qualify “the poor” as being those who are poor “in spirit”. And of course, there are several ways “poor in spirit” can be understood. For example, if we capitalize the “S” in Spirit, it changes everything. We’re no longer talking about the human spirit but rather the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, the Presence of God with us.
This ambiguity in meaning makes working with the Beatitudes a bit of a challenge, a challenge that needs more than its fair share of attention. We have to spend some time sorting out this first Beatitude in particular because it is the first thing Jesus taught his disciples and just like the “last words” of a teacher are important to summing up the heart of their teaching so also are a teacher’s “first words”. I believe Jesus has made his first teaching to be multifaceted in order to make us ponder what life in him is all about from different angles rather than in just one particular way. If I am poor in spirit (little s), I lack the umph, the capacity, to act in a way to change my life. I need God’s help. If I am poor in Spirit (capital S), then I have a poverty of God’s Presence in my life. I need God to be with me as much as if not more than just God’s help. The blessing in both those cases is God comes to us in our poverty of S(s)pirit to be present to us for our help. I tend towards capitalizing the “S” because we all experience a perceived poverty of the Presence of God in our lives without which we would never desire or want God in our lives.
This verse is the foundation upon which Jesus builds the rest of the Beatitudes. There’s a logical sequence to follow. Those who realize they are poor in Spirit will begin to mourn and our poverty in Spirit is also something we discover when we mourn. As poor in Spirit wrestle with their poverty in Spirit, they become meek and begin to hunger and thirst for righteousness. They start to become merciful leading to a purity in heart. They start to become peacemakers and find they suffer persecution simply for righteousness sake. God has changed their character and the world around them does not like that. So, being poor in Spirit and wrestling with that lays the foundation for the development of the character and conduct Jesus claims to be characteristic of the happy or blessed life. The blessing isn’t being wealthy, healthy, and happy all the time. It is life filled with the Presence of God and marked by God’s working in us. John in his Gospel would call the blessing “Eternal life”.
Moving on, in Hebrew thought sometimes the last thing said in a particular set of teachings is often just another way or repeating the first thing said. In the last Beatitude Jesus says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” That’s basically the same thing he said about being poor in Spirit. So, this should lead us to think that defining righteousness is the key to unlocking the meaning of what it is to be poor in Spirit.
Well, looking at the bigger picture of the Sermon on the Mount for which the Beatitudes are the preface, Jesus comments on righteousness later in it saying, “I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven (5:20).” If we look at the verses that immediately follow that verse, we find Jesus’ teaches that righteousness cannot be obtained simply by outward obedience. It is a matter of one’s inner will and attitude as they are made visible in our character and actions. You know, with a degree of self-control and usually a lot of downright being afraid of God it is possible to live a life of outward obedience. But, Jesus teaches that controlling our conduct does not make us righteous but rather it is in dealing with our inner person which needs of a fundamental transformation that righteousness begins to form. The part of us we hide; the part of us that gives birth to our motives, our inner person is where we need God’s Presence and help the most. Righteousness is an inward matter for which we need God’s Presence and God’s working in us cleansing and healing our sin-corrupted hearts is where we look for what it is to be poor in Spirit. It is our hearts that need to be changed.
To be poor in Spirit is the remorseful realization not just that we have messed up and hurt others and ourselves, but it comes with the added realization that “I need a do-over deep within us that only God can do”. I am powerless to be that better person that I know I ought to be. I need the help and presence of the one who made me. This remorsefulness is the result of the Holy Spirit giving us a taste of God’s Presence that opens our eyes to see that the best we can possibly be is naked and ashamed before the God who has proved his faithfulness and steadfast love to us time and again. The Holy Spirit points us towards Jesus not the self-help spirituality section of Chapters/Indigo. In Jesus we see who God is and who we are supposed to be. Jesus’ teachings here in the Sermon on Mount, indeed, the whole of the Bible, cuts us open like we are lab frogs in Tenth Grade Science Class and shows us our innards, our spiritual innards. The Holy Spirit makes us able to say Jesus is the Truth and looking at him I see the Truth with respect to me and I don’t measure up.
To be poor in Spirit is to be made poor by the Holy Spirit in that we realize we cannot be the righteous people we know we ought to be. We are powerless to do so. Just as those who are poor materially speaking, have no power but to obey the powers that dictate the terms of their lives, so also, we are powerless before our own sinful selves. We do not have the means within ourselves to cleanse our own hearts.
We realize our poverty, our powerlessness, and our hopelessness when the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to realize that God considers us his beloved children and acts accordingly towards us even though we do not deserve it. To be poor in Spirit is to be aware of one’s own sinfulness and need for God’s Presence and help. When the Holy Spirit opens us up to know just how much God loves us and the undeserved nature of that love, we see ourselves as nothing before God and yet also the apple of his eye. Mysteriously God takes us who are nothing and makes us into beautiful creatures who are meek, merciful, pure in heart and who strive to make peace in our relationships and are willing to and do suffer persecution for righteousness sake in this world.
To be poor in Spirit truly is to possess the kingdom of God. We should ask how a person who is so unhappy with their self having been made aware of their own sinfulness by the Holy Spirit opening their eyes to Jesus Christ, how could this person possibly be happy or called blessed. Well, it takes time but eventually we learn to rest in the certainty that in Christ we are beloved children of God. We grow into our happiness, our blessedness. Remember the feeding of the 5,000, how Jesus took the five loaves the disciples had, gave thanks, broke them, and gave them back to his disciples to distribute. It happens the same way for us. We offer our lives to Jesus and he breaks us of the prideful delusions we have of ourselves and then he entrusts us with his ministry of healing reconciliation in our relationships. He makes this possible because he has come to live in us by the indwelling of his Spirit. Happiness, the blessed life, comes in knowing that we are being and we are doing what God wants us to be and do. We are his beloved children striving to make peace in our relationships as an actual foretaste of the coming Kingdom of Heaven.
We must be poor in Spirit to have the Kingdom of heaven. This way of being does not mean we are to run around constantly down on ourselves because we fall short, which we do. Being poor in Spirit is a constant prayer for the Holy Spirit to fill our lives with the awareness of God’s presence with us and knowing God and his love for us, that we are God’s beloved. It is to know that even though we fall short of living lives that bring praise and glory to God, we are still immeasurably and unconditionally loved by God as his beloved child, the apple of his eye, and in some great mysterious way God is making us to be the persons God would have us to be. Amen.
