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Chapter 2. The Poor in Spirit (2)
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So now we may turn to the question: In what sense does the kingdom belong to the poor in spirit? By placing a possessive genitive, autôn, in an emphatic position in the Greek of the first Beatitude, Matthew indicates that the kingdom is ‘theirs and theirs alone’. But in what sense does Jesus as the embodiment and executor of the kingly rule of God belong to those and those alone who come to God with empty hands as spiritual beggars, placing all their trust in him?
 He belongs to them as they take him to their hearts. He belongs to them in the way that Solomon belongs to the Shulammite: ‘My lover is mine and I am his’ (Song of Songs 2.16). He belongs to them in the way that people the world over belong to each other when, one in heart and mind, they commit themselves to each other in love. As we shall see, the heart and mind of Christ is such that only the poor in spirit can share it. They alone possess the humility to acknowledge his sovereignty and place themselves under his rule. This is what Jesus meant when he told the Pharisees: ‘I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you’ (Matthew 21.31). In their poverty of spirit, those outcasts of society were able to submit joyfully and easily to the reign and rule of God in a way that the arrogant, self- righteous, rich-in-spirit Pharisees could not. That was the ‘good news’ that Jesus came to preach to ‘the poor’ (Isaiah 61.1; Luke 4.18; 7.22; Matthew 11.5).
And that was the limit to what possession of the kingdom of heaven meant in terms of present reality for the poor in spirit who listened to Jesus on that
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Note 15
It is true that on one occasion Jesus sent seventy-two of his disciples ahead of him, two by two, into the towns and villages he was about to visit; and they returned with joy saying: ‘Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name’ (Luke 10.17); but, apart from that, there is little in the gospels to suggest that, pre-Pentecost, the followers of Jesus did what we might call ‘kingdom works’. |
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Galilean hillside. The Lord could reign over them in love as they submitted their lives to him but, except in a limited way, he could not yet reign through them (Note 15). In time, they would receive his Spirit, but not until after his death, resurrection and ascension. When Jesus was teaching the Beatitudes, ‘the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified’ (John 7.39). And not until those first hearers and others who were ‘poor in spirit’ received his Spirit did Jesus implement and actualise the kingdom of heaven through persons other than himself. Luke refers to his gospel as a record of ‘all that Jesus began to do and to teach’ (Acts 1.1). His book of Acts is a record of all that Jesus continued to do and to teach through the poor in spirit. They — sufficiently empty to be filled with the Holy Spirit — became participators in the kingdom life of Jesus and then, by the power of that same Holy Spirit, became the ones through whom Jesus continued to reign and rule. When Peter told the crippled man at the temple gate: ‘Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk’ (Acts 3.6), he was illustrating in the clearest possible way at least part of what Jesus meant when he said ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’. Taking the cripple by the right hand, Peter helped him up, ‘and instantly the man’s feet and ankles became strong. He jumped to his feet and began to walk. Then he went with them into the temple courts, walking and jumping, and praising God’ (Acts 3.7-8). Again, and certainly no less than in the days when Jesus was present in the flesh, the kingdom of God was among them (Luke 17.20-21).
Although, according to the Greek of Matthew 5.3, Jesus said: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’, we should note that Jesus would have used no connecting verb in the actual words he spoke for neither Aramaic nor Hebrew has a true copula (Note 16). Jesus would simply
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Note 16
There is a verb yesh that is used in statements of existence, but it is ordinarily used as a copula only in the future tense where its meaning is ‘become’. |
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have said: ‘Blessed, the poor! — theirs the kingdom of heaven’. And this widens the scope of the blessing. Though by his choice of estin (‘is’), Matthew stresses that the kingdom of heaven is a present possession of the poor in spirit, the absence of anything corresponding to estin in the Aramaic means that we are free to consider also the future aspect of possessing the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom already belongs to the poor in spirit in the sense that Jesus rules over them and reigns through them; but it belongs to them too in the sense that they will, at the end of time, participate in the great and glorious consummation of the kingdom of which they are already citizens. Now, the kingdom belongs to them in that they are instruments of the kingdom’s inauguration, but when the end comes the kingdom will belong to them in that they will inherit and enjoy all its glories and riches. ‘Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world”’ (Matthew 25.34). Then, they will ‘shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father’ (Matthew 13.43). This is where James places the emphasis: ‘Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? (James 2.5).
The seventy-two who returned to Jesus rejoicing that, through them, God had exercised his sovereign power and authority over demons were told to rejoice rather that their names were already ‘written in heaven’ (Luke 10.20). There was a sense in which they already had the kingdom, but there was a sense too in which it was yet to come; and their instruction from the Lord was to pray to the Father for that to happen: ‘Your kingdom come’ (Matthew 6.10).
We have tried to understand what it meant to those who sat at the feet of Jesus in the Western hills above Galilee when he said: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’. But, from our post- Resurrection, post-Ascension, post-Pentecost perspective, we can see (in a way that they could not) how the one who delivered this Beatitude was himself the most ‘poor in spirit’ person who has ever walked the earth, and the one who, in consequence, has most fully been blessed by being given the kingdom of heaven.
Paul tells us: ‘For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich’ (2 Corinthians 8.9). The phrase ‘he became
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Note 17
The New Testament in Modern English, J B Phillips. |
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poor’ is eptôcheusen and ‘poverty’ is ptôcheia. Both are from the same root as ptôchos — ‘poor’ — in the Beatitude, and the sense is that described earlier in this chapter. Though ‘rich beyond our telling’ (Note 17), Jesus made himself destitute, so that through his destitution we might become rich.
How was he rich? He was ‘in very nature God’ (Philippians 2.6). In Greek, the phrase is en morphê theou hyparchôn which means ‘being really and truly in the form of God’. So Jesus was rich in every way in which God is rich: rich in glory, rich in majesty, rich in authority, rich in privilege, rich in knowledge, rich in presence, rich in power, rich in ownership. Everything in heaven was his; the earth ‘and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it’ (Psalm 24.1). He owned ‘every animal of the forest ... and the cattle on a thousand hills’ (Psalms 50.10). Yet, says Paul, he ‘did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness (Philippians 2.6-7). The phrase ‘made himself nothing’ is heauton ekenôsen which means ‘he emptied himself out’. He emptied himself of all that made him rich — his glory, his majesty, his authority, his privilege, his omniscience, his omnipresence, his omnipotence and his ownership. And he became not a servant but a doulos — a slave; one who was owned but who himself owned nothing.
‘Mild He lays his glory by,’ wrote Charles Wesley (Note 18). And of that great laying-by of glory, George Herbert, even more strikingly, wrote this (Note 19):
The God of power, as he did ride
In his majestick robes of glorie,
Resolv’d to light; and so one day
He did descend, undressing all the way.
This disrobing was a manifestation of the poverty of spirit of which Jesus spoke in the first Beatitude. Although he was born in a borrowed stable and
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Notes 18 and 19
18. Hark! The herald-angels sing, Charles Wesley.
19. The Bag, from The Temple (1633), George Herbert. NB: ‘to light’ means ‘to alight’, ie, from the steed on which he was mounted. |
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was laid to rest in a borrowed grave, he did not go through this earthly life in complete economic destitution. Mary and Joseph were not rich — they could not afford a lamb as the sacrifice for Mary’s purification, only the prescribed alternative of two pigeons (Luke 2.24; Leviticus 12.8) — but, as a carpenter (Matthew 13.55), Joseph would have managed to meet all the legitimate needs of himself, his wife Mary, and (eventually) seven or more children (Mark 6.3). So, too, Jesus, plying the same trade (Mark 6.3) would have had a steady income until he began his ministry at about the age of thirty (Luke 3.23). Even then, though Jesus had ‘nowhere to lay his head’ (Matthew 8.20) in the sense of having a home of his own, there were those who supported him and his disciples (Luke 8.3) with contributions so generous that Judas was able to line his own pocket from the common purse (John 12.6). And there was at least one family besides his own whose home was his for the asking (Luke 10.38; John 12.1-2).
But he was truly destitute in his empty-handedness before God. And he was truly poor in his humility before men. We see it demonstrated unforgettably when, at the last supper, he ‘got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel round his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped round him’ (John 13.4-5). Here, in a perfect vignette of the great self-emptying about which Paul would later write in Philippians 2, Jesus literally takes the very nature of a slave and behaves as one to those who call him Master.
Jesus was truly poor too in his spirit of utter dependance on the Father. ‘I tell you the truth,’ said Jesus, ‘the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does’ (John 5.19). ‘By myself I can do nothing’ (John 5.30). ‘I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me’ (John 8.28). ‘For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it’ (John 12.49). ‘The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work’ (John 14.10).
Jesus’ final act of trust, humility, self-emptying and poverty of spirit came on Calvary. ‘And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross! (Philippians 2.8). Jesus finally emptied himself of the one thing he had left; life itself. As the prophet had foretold: ‘he poured out his life unto death’ (Isaiah 53.12). And the one who had once been equal with God came to God, as always, with empty hands, placing all his trust in him and crying, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit’ (Luke 23.46).
And what was the result? ‘Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’ (Philippians 2.9-11). His was the kingdom of heaven! In him was the first Beatitude fulfilled to perfection. God raised Jesus from the dead ‘and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet ...’ (Ephesians 1.20-22). One of those crucified with Jesus had asked: ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom’ (Luke 23:42). And now Jesus had come into his kingdom — ‘the kingdom of the Son he [the Father] loves’ (Colossians 1.13).
Poverty of spirit, an inner sense of one’s destitution coupled with a placing of one’s whole trust in God, is now, as it always has been, the key to the kingdom of heaven. It unlocks the door to salvation.
Jesus told the story of the tax collector and the Pharisee:
Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men — robbers, evildoers, adulterers — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get’. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner’ (Luke 18.10-13).
Jesus comments: ‘I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted’ (Luke 18.14).
The story juxtaposes the tax collector — illustrative of the poor in spirit to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs — and the Pharisee — illustrative of the proud in spirit to whom the kingdom of heaven is denied. And in the ‘woe’ that matches the first beatitude, Jesus tells the Pharisees: ‘You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to’ (Matthew 23.13). The Pharisees closed the kingdom of heaven to themselves and others by insisting that there were performance-based entry requirements; that admission rested on righteousness under the law. And they were ‘confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else’ (Luke 18.9). Thus, they showed that the one key that would unlock the door to heaven was the one key they did not possess: poverty of spirit.
Peter might well have had this story, and Jesus’ comment on it, in mind when he wrote: ‘All of you, clothe yourselves with humility towards one another, because, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time’ (1 Peter 5.5-6). And it is worth noting that ‘the humble’ in the text that Peter is quoting (Proverbs 3.34) is ’anîyîm — ‘the poor’.
Poverty of spirit and humility are, in fact, the two sides of the same coin. Charles Wesley recognises this in his hymn, ‘O for a thousand tongues’, when he ends the fourth verse with the line, ‘The humble poor believe’. And Dante Alighieri recognises it too in The Divine Comedy. There, as he and Virgil
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Notes 20-23
20. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, Cantica II Purgatory, translated by Dorothy L Sayers (1955, Penguin Books), Canto XII.
21. Forty-Four Sermons, John Wesley, 1946, Epworth Press, Sermon XVI, I.7.
22. Rock of ages, A M Toplady, v 3.
23. Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke, I, John Calvin, p 261. |
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prepare to climb up the Pass of Pardon, they are met by the Angel of Humility who brushes Dante’s forehead with his wings and erases the P of Pride while voices sing ‘Beati pauperes spiritu’ — ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’. The angel tells him: ‘henceforth an easier climb is yours’ (Note 20).
John Wesley says: ‘Poverty of spirit ... is a just sense of our inward and outward sins, and of our guilt and helplessness’ (Note 21), and that is certainly true as regards the poverty of spirit that leads to salvation. The old hymn (Note 22) graphically describes how recognition of our true emptiness, nakedness and helplessness is the attitude that brings us within the ambit of the saving work of Christ:
Nothing in my hand I bring,
simply to thy cross I cling;
naked, come to thee for dress,
helpless, look to thee for grace;
foul, I to the fountain fly;
wash me, Saviour, or I die.
Calvin says: ‘He only who is reduced to nothing in himself, and relies on the mercy of God, is poor in spirit’ (Note 23). And it is important to realise that this is true not only of the poverty of spirit that leads to salvation but also of the poverty of spirit that unlocks every other aspect of kingdom life. Here, it will be helpful to consider another saying of Jesus which, though it appears to displace the first Beatitude, actually clarifies and reinforces it:
Then little children were brought to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them. But the disciples rebuked those who brought them. Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these’ (Matthew 19:13-14).
On the face of it, Jesus has supplanted the poor in spirit with the childlike and decreed that the kingdom of heaven shall belong to the latter rather than the former; but that is not the case. The truth is that there is no difference between the two. Childlikeness and poverty in spirit are one and the same
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Note 24
The same is true of sheep, which is why Jesus can say: ‘Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom’ (Luke 12.32). Poverty of spirit, childlikeness and sheep-likeness all describe a common set of qualities and characteristics. |
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thing. The children in the incident would be very young — only one year old, for that is the age at which Jewish mothers, in those days, took their children to some distinguished rabbi to have him bless them. And the point about very little children is that they are entirely dependant on their parents. They possess nothing, so they can bring nothing. All they can give is trust and love. They are weak and they are helpless (Note 24). Like beggars who are utterly destitute, all they have are empty, outstretched hands. That is why Luke places this story of the children immediately after the story of the tax collector and the Pharisee. (Luke 18.10-17).
C S Lewis calls this ‘full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need’, not poverty of spirit (though that is what it is), but ‘Need-love’ and, lest we try to credit ourselves with the virtue of possessing it, he reminds us that even it is bestowed by grace. "Of course the Grace does not create the need. That is there already; ‘given’ (as the mathematicians say) in the mere
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Note 25
The Four Loves, C S Lewis, 1960, Collins, Chapter 6. Interestingly, at the beginning of Chapter 1, he says that ‘our Need-love, as Plato saw it, is "the son of Poverty"’. |
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fact of our being creatures, and incalculably increased by our being fallen creatures. What the Grace gives is the full recognition, the sensible awareness, the complete acceptance — even, with certain reservations, the glad acceptance — of this Need. For, without Grace, our wishes and our necessities are in conflict."
And though there may be tears of remorse when we first come to God in poverty of spirit, Lewis notes that there is a joy in our ongoing total dependance on God. He says: ‘We become jolly beggars’ (Note 25).
Those who find themselves enjoying the salvation of God are those who come to God in abject poverty of spirit having nothing with which to pay the price of their redemption and nothing with which to buy their acceptance and love. But, likewise, those who find themselves growing in grace and in effective ministry are those who come to God in the same destitution of spirit having nothing with which to generate fruit and nothing with which to serve God or do his works.
It is in this area of ministry that the biggest problems arise. It is all too easy in today’s resource-rich world to become resource-dependant; to spend time
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Note 26
It is not the ordained ministry that is in mind here, but the ministry of all Christians, one to another and to the world, as channels of God’s grace. |
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and money and energy in acquiring qualifications, building libraries, attending courses and conferences, mastering techniques, and learning strategies, so that as soon as there is any call to ministry (Note 26), however large or small, we can meet it by turning to the many and various aids we have so assiduously placed at our disposal. It is all too easy to be like the angel of the
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Notes 27 and 28
27. Though we must be careful not to buttress an argument in favour of academic prowess with 2 Timothy 2:15. Paul did not exhort Timothy to ‘study’, as the King James Version has it. The Greek is spoudason which means ‘make haste, be eager’. So what Paul said was: ‘Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth’ (NIV).
28. It is interesting to note that, when Paul stood to speak to the intellectuals of Athens, the Spirit prompted him to pick up and use two maxims drawn from his presumably long-unused resource of Greek poetry. Both quotations are in Acts 17.28. The first — ‘For in him we live and move and have our being’ — is taken from a quatrain attributed to the Cretan poet Epimenides in his poem Cretica. The second — ‘We are his offspring’ — is taken from the Cilician poet Aratus in Phaenomena 5. |
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church in Laodicea to whom Jesus said: ‘You say, “I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.” But you do not realise that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked’ (Revelation 3.17).
This is not to be anti-intellectual (Note 27), it is simply to remind ourselves that the attitude before God that will make our ministry a manifestation and expression of the reign and rule of God is poverty of spirit. We must leave our qualifications, our books, our techniques and our strategies outside the door when we ‘enter into our closet’ (Matthew 6.6 KJV) and we must approach God with empty hands. If, by his Spirit, he then directs us to pick up any of those resources as we leave, so be it (Note 28). If not, so be it, too. Paul, who once described himself and his companions, ‘as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things’ (2 Corinthians 6.10), can teach us much about this. He called it, ‘having no confidence in the flesh’:
For it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh — though I myself have reasons for such confidence. If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ — the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead (Philippians 3:3-11).
This is true poverty of spirit as regards growth and ministry. This is the poverty of spirit that gave Paul the kingdom of heaven in terms of seeing the exalted Christ reign and rule through him from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. And this is the poverty of spirit that gave Paul the kingdom of heaven in terms of his future inheritance in the kingdom of light (Colossians 1.12). True poverty of spirit will give to us today a similar share in both the present and the future reign of God, for the word of blessing has been spoken and it empowers for possession of the kingdom all those who bring themselves beneath that word.
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