Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Today’s Scripture: Matthew 5:1-12
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 5:3)
“Blessings on the poor in spirit! The kingdom of heaven is yours” (Matt. 5:3) doesn’t mean, “You will go to heaven when you die.” It means you will be one of those through whom God’s kingdom, heaven’s rule, begins to appear on earth as in heaven. The Beatitudes are the agenda for kingdom people. They are not simply about how to behave, so that God will do something nice to you. They are about the way in which Jesus wants to rule the world.” ― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters
For centuries, people have debated what "poor in spirit" means in Jesus’ Beatitudes, but understanding the context can help us. Matthew's gospel is written primarily to a Jewish audience and is aimed at telling us that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of David and son of Abraham, and that he's the one who fulfills the law by embodying it. So when Jesus talks about the poor in spirit, our beginning clue is the information that Matthew has shared with the reader before chapter 5 about Jesus and the nature of Jesus own life and character.
Looking back at chapter 3, Matthew tells us about Jesus' baptism, where the voice of God says, "This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well-pleased" (3:17) Matthew and Jesus often used images taken from the prophet, Isaiah, for example, Matthew later describes Jesus by saying, “just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many." (Matt. 20:28) That's an echo back to Isaiah 42:1, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.” When God is speaking to the figure called the Suffering Servant. Matthew right at the onset identifies, Jesus, the king of God's kingdom and is marked as a servant who came to give his life for the world (20:28).
Jesus then immediately obeys the Spirit in chapter 4 and goes out into the wilderness where he engages in radical self-denial. To be "poor in spirit" combines these three traits of Jesus: 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 his or her life has no purpose apart from God. They obey God not out of obligation, but out of a desire to gain something better, a life within God's kingdom. The poor in spirit are those who voluntarily empty themselves so that they can be filled by God.
In both Hebrew and Greek there are two words that are translated into English as “blessed.” The Hebrew and Greek words parallel each other. The first word which does not appear in the Beatitudes is used in the way a worship leader might use it when they ask God’s blessing upon an individual or community eager to receive something from God, i.e., healing, children, wisdom, purpose, etc.
The other word does not imply a request made to God, not asking God to invoke a blessing. Rather the word recognizes an existing state of happiness or blessing which an individual or community already possesses. The word affirms a quality of spirituality that is already present. We might state, “Mrs. Smith is a blessed person in the church.” We are not asking God to bless Mrs. Smith, we are acknowledging rather that she already possesses this quality as a blessed person.
Jesus was a part of the prophetic tradition and for him, like Isaiah, “the poor” are the humble and pious who seek God. Isaiah 66:2 may be where Jesus borrows this language, “But this is the one to whom I will look, to the humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at my word.” For Isaiah the word “contrite” is the same as the “poor.” Isaiah does on rare occasion uses the “poor” to refer to people who do not have enough to eat. (Isa. 58:7) Mostly Isaiah uses the word to describe the humble and pious who know they need God’s grace and “tremble” at his word.
Blessed refers to a spiritual condition of divinely gifted joy already present, not a requirement to be fulfilled in order to receive a reward. Jesus affirms that these blessed ones make up the membership of the Kingdom, which is already theirs. Jesus is stating that the poor in spirit already possess the kingdom and the evidence of its existence can be found in these individuals.
This leads to the second beatitude, which focuses the attention from the inward to the outward: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." (v. 4) Disciples who are poor in spirit, who have turned their attention away from themselves, now turn their attention to the world and begin to see the world as it currently exists. They can see 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.
Combine those two beatitudes together and you get the third: "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." (v. 5) Meekness does not mean being wimpy, meekness combines: 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. These individuals want nothing from the world while, at the same time, are willing to share everything with it, these are the meek.
We begin to understand and experience the Kingdom of God as described in the Beatitudes by looking to: The poor in spirit. The mourning. The meek. Those who hunger for righteousness. The pure in heart. The merciful. The peacemakers. The persecuted peacemakers. The slandered, insulted and persecuted peacemakers. These are the people of God's kingdom. The church should be the place where we begin to develop this kind of character as we work and minister with each other. Living like this is a sign that God's kingdom is breaking all around us. The more we focus on living like the people of the kingdom of God, the more likely this present world will start to look like God’s kingdom.
“God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being "right," we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life.” ― Dallas Willard
Today’s Lectionary Readings
Morning: Psalms 5; 147:1–11
Evening: Psalms 27; 51
Jeremiah 8:4–7, 18–9:6
Romans 5:1–11
John 8:12–20
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