When Jesus of Nazareth opened his mouth and began preaching the Beatitudes by the Sea of Galilee, as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, his listeners were most likely confused. Or alarmed. Or even offended.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit"? What? At a time when poverty was usually seen as an embarrassment, or worse, as a punishment for one’s sins or for a lack of industry, the invitation to be “poor in spirit” must have struck many listeners as bizarre. Isn’t God’s Spirit a good thing? Shouldn’t I want to be rich in spirit?
But poverty of spirit was one of Jesus’s ways of talking about humility. Think of the Pharisee in Luke’s Gospel, who prays in the Temple, utterly confident of his own holiness. He prays, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.” Even if we don’t fast twice a week and tithe, many of us may occasionally catch ourselves thinking similar thoughts: “Boy, I’m a lot holier than that other guy!” But Jesus contrasts him with the tax collector who does not even raise his eyes to heaven and prays “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” The tax collector is poor in spirit, that is, he understands his radical reliance on God. Yet, paradoxically, he is rich in Jesus’s eyes.
Poverty of spirit means that you understand your ultimate dependence on God--for everything. As philosophers like to say, you see that your whole life is “contingent.”
Yet it is not a hopeless or despairing state. Just the opposite. Why? Because everything you are, your whole being, and all of your talents and skills, comes from and is sustained by God; and so there is no need to worry about anything. Or fear anything. “My help is in the Lord,” as Psalm 121 says, “who made heaven and earth.”
It is also not a state of inactivity. When we are poor in spirit, we don’t simply wait around idly to let God do something, we are filled with the confidence that God is with us. And so we act. We do. We love. We participate. We contribute. We use all of the skills and talents that God gave us to help, in our own way, build up the Kingdom of God. Without God, we can do nothing. With God, all things are possible.
Some of those who were on the Mount of the Beatitudes that day probably have gone away confused, or even disgusted. But some of them may have lingered a bit to discuss what Jesus had said. "What do you think he meant by that?" And some of them, who were able to see in that phrase an invitation to a new way of life, followed Jesus, all the way to the Cross.
And there on the Cross he emptied himself totally, bringing to a close an earthly life that was, in its unique way, poor in spirit. Then, three days later he became immeasurably rich. And enriched all of us.
Image source: Helena Bochorakova-Dittrichova, Sermon on the Mount, http://sacredartmeditations.com/life/detail/44
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