Poverty of Spirit (1 of 2)

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. Jesus says this seated on a hillside in Galilee. The words function as a specification — they describe the input condition for everything that follows in his sermon and everything that follows in the disciple's life. Matthew records the Beatitudes as the opening movement of the Sermon on the Mount — eight of them, each beginning with the same word, each naming a disposition Jesus calls blessed. They have been treated, often, as a list of virtues to choose from. They are not a list. They are ordered. The first one is the door. The other seven are what the disciple is being given on the other side of that door. Without the first, the rest are not available. With it, the rest follow.

The Greek word matters. Ptōchos. Jesus chose the harder word with the precision of a writer who knew exactly what the other available word would have meant. The other available word was penēs — the working poor, the day-laborer with a small wage. Penēs describes a hard life. Ptōchos describes a different category altogether. The ptōchos was the beggar at the city gate with his palms open — the man who had no work, no land, no resource, no claim to anything, only the willingness to receive what someone else might give. The word does not mean modest poverty on a spectrum of poverties. It means absolute destitution. Jesus picked it because the disposition he was naming is not relative humility. It is total bankruptcy. The disciple in the first Beatitude is the one who has come to the place where he knows he has nothing to bring to the connection except the willingness to receive what is given.

This is the disciple's side of the argument Chapter 5 made about mass and acceleration. That chapter showed, in the cleanest mathematical terms the volume has used, that ascent by created means cannot reach the Creator. The energy cost approaches infinity. The gap will not close from the lower side. The geometry forbids it. The Beatitude names what the disciple does at the place where ascent has been shown to fail. He stops proposing his own ascent. He recognizes that he has nothing of the right kind to purchase what he needs. He stands at the gate empty-handed. The Beatitude is not asking the disciple to manufacture a humble disposition. It is asking him to recognize a state of affairs the mathematics has already established.

Chrysostom saw the sequence in the late fourth century, preaching through Matthew in Antioch in homilies the church has kept for sixteen hundred years. He treated the list not as a menu but as a staircase. Each step depended on the one before it. The mourning of the second Beatitude was the mourning of the man who had seen his bankruptcy; without bankruptcy the mourning had nothing to mourn. The meekness of the third was the meekness of the man whose pride had collapsed; without the collapse the meekness was performance. The hunger for righteousness of the fourth was the hunger of the man whose attempt at his own righteousness had been emptied. Augustine, working through the same text a generation later, agreed. The Beatitudes are ordered. The first is the foundation. Skip it, and the rest become a moralism on stilts.

The disposition Jesus names was not a New Testament invention. The God of Israel had been on record about the kind of human He would dwell with for centuries before the Sermon on the Mount. Isaiah 57:15 names it most directly. The high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy, dwells in the high and holy place — and also with him who is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite. Two locations are named for the same God in the same verse. The high and holy place. And the contrite and humble spirit. The God who is most above is the God who comes most low — not to the great heart but to the broken one. Isaiah 66:2 sharpens the same point. To this man will I look, says the LORD: him that is poor and of a contrite spirit and trembleth at my word.

Jesus gave His own commentary on what poverty of spirit looks like in a praying man. Luke 18 records the parable. Two men went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee — religiously serious, morally upright, observant of the law in ways most of his contemporaries were not. The other was a tax collector — a Jewish man in the employ of Rome, despised on both religious and patriotic grounds. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself — Luke's grammar is exact and damning — God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. The prayer is grammatically correct. The list of disciplines is impressive. The man is not lying about himself.

The tax collector stood afar off and would not so much as lift up his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. Six Greek words in the prayer. No list. No comparison with other men. No claim of disciplines kept. The man knows what he is and says it. And then Jesus delivers the verdict that overturns every religious assumption his hearers were operating with. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other. The breast-beating tax collector went home in the right. The disciplined Pharisee did not. The reversal is not arbitrary. Jesus told this parable, Luke notes in the introduction, to certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others. The trust was the disqualifying move. Poverty of spirit is what the tax collector had and what the Pharisee, with all his disciplines, did not.