Dear Parish Family,

The Beatitudes provide a dizzying new vision of the world, a perspective designed to turn upside down the political and social world of the Roman Empire of Caesar Augustus and of the Jewish religious elite of Judea and Jerusalem. Likewise it calls us to a drastic and fundamental reassessment of our own political and social affairs, a reassessment that will not be realized without our dependence on God. No wonder, then, that the worldly mock and scorn the Beatitudes. If anyone thinks that the Beatitudes are for the weak then they really don’t understand the strength that it takes to live them out. It does take great inner strength to live up to the standards given us in the Beatitudes.  

Jesus describes those who are truly fortunate, the lucky ones of their day. But it is not emperors, conquerors, priests, and the wealthy who enjoy this favor. Rather, it is the common people, those whom earthly success has largely passed by: the poor, the meek, the persecuted, and the peacemakers. How can this be? The answer is that even though they may have been denied worldly success, what cannot be taken away from them is their potential to live rightly. It is all too easy for those who enjoy the power, pleasures and privileges of this world from their hilltop mansions to float above such obligations. Jesus goes on to say that so long as ordinary people stand for the right things and do not retreat in their rightness before those who seem to have more power, what is right will prevail. What matters most is the centrality of Divinity in one’s life. This is the birth of the kingdom — a kingdom organized not from the top down, but from the bottom up.

Several common misunderstandings can block our comprehension of the first Beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. Some people take the phrase “poor in spirit” as analogous with language like “the soil is poor in minerals”—as if the condition of being relatively spirit-less was being used. Of course such meaning does not fit into the scheme of ‘Blessedness”. Nor does this refer to a consolation of the destitute, as if Jesus were saying to the economically deprived, “Don't worry: you are suffering now in your poverty, but your present suffering will be amply recompensed in the next life, after you die.” But “kingdom of heaven” is simply Matthew's Jewish way of referring to what is elsewhere in the Gospels called “the kingdom of God,” or God's reign, already inaugurated in the life of Jesus and accessible even before death.

In Luke's version, “Blessed are [you] poor,” prompts some to argue that Christ congratulates the economically destitute, whereas Matthew's version somehow takes the bite out of the Beatitude by “spiritualizing” it with the phrase “in spirit.” The case can be made that both Luke and Matthew are faithful to the teaching of Jesus, which draws its meaning of “the poor” from Isaiah. In a number of places, Isaiah describes Israel in exile as poor, hungry, and mourning as they await God's response to their need for rescue from exile. In this context, to be poor is to know your need for God. Once we are in touch with the biblical home base of “the poor,” we can see why Matthew introduced the phrase “in spirit,” for knowing one's need for God is a disposition of the heart, not an economic state. The poor in spirit are those who, no matter how much money they may have, realize they are relatively powerless without God’s power, an empowerment that gives them security in the face of all loss and disaster. We want abundance, control, and authority to conquer the kingdoms of the earth. His wisdom affirms that only the poor in spirit can achieve the reign of God. It has been the fate of some Christians blithely to bear the name of Christ without ever having weighed his startling challenge of being ‘poor in spirit.’

Fr. Tom Kunnel C.O.