“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for their’s is the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 5:3
When former president John Kennedy was running for the Senate in his earlier years, he was stopped on the campaign trail by a poor laborer who had a question for him. “Mr. Kennedy,” he asked, “do you know what it’s like to not be able to pay your bills, to wonder how you’ll get food on the table, to struggle to make ends meet? Do you know what it’s like to be poor?”
Kennedy was sharp enough to realize that it would do him no good to pretend he wasn’t wealthy. So he responded, “No, I don’t know what it’s like to be poor.” To that the man in the crowd answered back, “Well, you haven’t missed a thing.”
That’s the way we tend to think of poverty – any poverty. It’s a bad thing and if we can avoid it, we won’t have missed a thing. It’s this belief that makes Jesus’ words in the first beatitude so shockingly hard to hear. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for their’s is the kingdom of heaven.” We aren’t helped much when we learn the meaning of the word “poor” here.
In the New Testament there are two words that are commonly translated poor. The first means to be poor to the point that you are constantly having to work in order to maintain your living. You don’t have much, but at least you can get by on your own. This isn’t the word that Jesus used. He used a word for poor that means to be totally destitute, helpless, and absolutely dependent on others to survive. According to Jesus, it is the ones who have this kind of poverty of spirit who have the kingdom of heaven and live extraordinary lives. There are several things about this pathway that we need to know.
People who walk the pathway of spiritual poverty are not defined by externals. It shouldn’t surprise us that this beatitude falls right on the heels of the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. After fending off two attacks by Satan, the final temptation was an offer to possess the kingdoms of this world and all their splendor. Of course, Jesus rebuffed this temptation, but it’s still a powerful reminder that we live in a world where we’re constantly being tempted to define ourselves by our external circumstances whether good or bad and not by the state of our souls.
However, those who walk the pathway of spiritual poverty have given up looking to the outside world for their value. They realize that the world has nothing to offer that can address their poverty of spirit, therefore, they refuse to be evaluated by either what they have or don’t have.
One pastor described it this way:
If I’m poor of spirit, I turn my back on all culturally bound measures of my wealth and worth and pay no mind to human standards of success or failure…. I refuse to see myself as the sum total of the heft of my resume’ or the paucity of my credentials, the breadth of my riches or the extent of my debt, the quality of my friends or the disdain of my enemies. I could be the graduate of a distinguished university, or a local night school or an eighth grade drop out; the president of my country club or the captain of my factory’s bowling team; live in an exclusive neighborhood, a row house, or a prison cell – and it would not matter….because spiritual poverty is liberation from the authority I assign to these and other things to serve as a measure of my worth, and instead has the faith and willingness to look elsewhere for it.”
People who walk the pathway of spiritual poverty recognize their neediness. It stands to reason that if we’re totally destitute spiritually that it ought to be obvious just how needy we are, but that’s precisely the problem. It’s so easy to deceive ourselves into thinking that we aren’t quite as spiritually impoverished as we really are. We look at others around us whose spiritual poverty seems more obvious, and we conclude that we aren’t destitute after all. We may not be where we need to be, but at least we aren’t like them. So we feel no need for God’s mercy and grace. In such a state, we can never experience extraordinary living. For as long as we tightly hold onto the riches of our supposed goodness, we’ll never have a hand that is desperate enough to open it to receive God’s gift of the kingdom.
Sadly, this can happen even after we’ve become followers of Christ. At first, we recognize our spiritual poverty which is what drove us to seek the riches of God’s grace in the first place. Afterward, we started growing and learning. Soon, almost without recognizing it, we develop what Methodist pastor James Howell describes as “spiritual amnesia.” We forget our past spiritual poverty and begin congratulating ourselves that we aren’t like other people are. Jesus said that such people have their reward.
In contrast, I read once about a bankruptcy court that begins each day in an unusual way. The bailiff enters the courtroom and makes the following announcement: “All debtors rise.” At that CEO’s of companies which have failed stand beside regular people who can no longer pay their debts.
That’s what Jesus is saying here. Only those who can stand up and claim their spiritual indebtedness are able to live extraordinary lives, for they are the only ones who are in a position to receive the riches of the grace of God which makes it possible for them to possess the kingdom of heaven.
People who walk the pathway of spiritual poverty have life’s greatest riches. Jesus said that those who are able to embrace their spiritual poverty are the ones who possess the kingdom of heaven. These are the ones who not only claim their poverty but also turn to Christ to receive the riches of His grace. Therefore, they possess the kingdom.
We normally tend to think of this in terms of eternity. “I get to go to heaven when I die.” That’s true, but note that Jesus doesn’t say that the poor in spirit will have the kingdom of heaven. Instead He says that their’s is the kingdom of heaven – present tense. They already have the kingdom.
Pastor Frederick Buechner described it this way:
“If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God… is what all of us hunger for above all things even when we don’t know its name or realize that it’s what we’re starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The kingdom of God is where I belong. It’s home, and whether we realize it or not, I think all of us are homesick for it.”
How true. It’s those who walk the pathway of spiritual poverty who are able to possess this kind of kingdom, and that’s why they are able to live extraordinary lives.